1982 Janine
Page 38
I will stand on the platform an hour from now, briefcase in hand, a neater figure than most but not remarkable. I will have the poise of an acrobat about to step on to a high wire, of an actor about to take the stage in a wholly new play. Nobody will guess what I am going to do. I do not know it myself. But I will not do nothing. No, I will not do nothing. O Janine, my silly soul, come to me now. I will be gentle. I will be kind.
Footsteps in corridor.
KNOCK KNOCK.
A woman’s voice.
“Eight-fifteen, Mr McLeish. Breakfast is being served till nine.”
My voice.
“All right.”
EPILOGUE FOR THE DISCERNING CRITIC.
You have noticed lines in this book taken from Chaucer Shakespeare Jonson The Book of Common Prayer Goldsmith Cowper Anon Mordaunt Burns Blake Scott Byron Shelley Campbell Wordsworth Coleridge Keats Browning Tennyson Newman Henley Stevenson Hardy Yeats Brooke Owens Hasék (in Parrott’s translation, slightly shortened) Kafka Pritchett Auden cummings Lee and Jackson, so I will list only writers whose work gave ideas for bigger bits.
The matter of Scotland refracted through alcoholic reverie is from MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. The narrator without self-respect is from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Céline’s Journey to the End of Night, the first-person novels of Flann O’Brien and from Camus’s The Fall. An elaborate fantasy within a plausible everyday fiction is from O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Making the fantasy pornographic is from Buñuel’s film Belle de Jour and from The Nightclerk, a novel by someone whose name I forget. The character of Mad Hislop is taken from Mr Johnstone in Tom Leonard’s poem Four of the Belt, which he here allows me to reprint:
334 SOURCES
Jenkins, all too clearly it is time
for some ritual physical humiliation;
and if you cry, boy, you will prove
what I suspect – you are not a man.
As they say, Jenkins, this hurts me
more than it hurts you. But I show you
I am a man, by doing this, to you.
When you are a man, Jenkins, you may hear
that physical humiliation and ritual
are concerned with strage adult matters
– like rape, or masochistic fantasies.
You will not accept such stories:
rather, you will recall with pride,
perhaps even affection, that day when I,
Mr Johnstone, summoned you before me,
and gave you four of the belt
like this. And this. And this. And this.
Brian McCabe’s Feathered Choristers in the Collins Scottish short-story collection of 1979 showed how all these things could combine in one.
The most beholden chapter is the eleventh. The plot is from the programme note to Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique; rhythms and voices are from the Blocksberg scenes in Goethe’s Faust and night town scenes in Joyce’s Ulysses; the self-inciting vocative is from Jim Kelman’s novel The Bus-conductor Hines; the voice of my nontranscendent god from e e cummings. The political part of Jock’s vomiting fit is from The Spendthrifts, a great Spanish novel in which Benito Pérez Galdós puts a social revolution into the stomach and imagination of a sick little girl. The graphic use of typeface is from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and poems by Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan.
Though too busy to be aware of the foregoing influences while writing under them I consciously took information and ideas (which she would disown) from a correspondence with Tina Reid, also anecdotes from conversations with Andrew Sykes, Jimmy Guy and Tom Lamb, also three original phrases of Glasgow invective from Jim Caldwell. Richard Fletcher informed and improved the book’s electrical and mechanical parts. The fanciful use of light and space technology comes partly from conversations with Chris Boyce and partly from his book, Extraterrestrial Encounters.
335 THANKS
Flo Allan typed all perfectly with help from Scott Pearson in the denser pages of chapter 11. Ian Craig, the art director, Judy Linard the designer, Jane Hill the editor, Bunge, Will, Phil and Tom the typesetters, Peva Keane the proofreader, worked uncommonly hard to make this book exactly as it should be.
And now a personal remark which purely literary minds will ignore. Though John McLeish is an invention of mine I disagree with him. In chapter 4, for example, he says of Scotland, “We are a poor little country, always have been, always will be.” In fact Scotland’s natural resources are as variedly rich as those of any other land. Her ground area is greater than that of Denmark, Holland, Belgium or Switzerland, her population higher than that of Denmark, Norway or Finland. Our present ignorance and bad social organisation make most Scots poorer than most other north Europeans, but even bad human states are not everlasting.
Finally I acknowledge the support of Mad Toad, Crazy Shuggy, Tam the Bam and Razor King, literature-loving friends in the Glasgow Mafia who will go any length to reason with editors, critics and judges who fail to celebrate the shining merit of the foregoing volume.
In retreat,
The Monastery of Santa Semplicità,
Orvieto,
April 1983
A.G.
1982 CRITICISM OF THE FOREGOING BOOK
“1982 JANINE has a verbal energy, an intensity of vision that has mostly been missing from the English novel since D. H. Lawrence.”
Jonathan Baumbach, New York Times
“I recommend nobody to read this book … it is sexually oppressive, the sentences are far too long and it is boring … hogwash. Radioactive hogwash.”
Peter Levi, The BBC Book Programme, Bookmark
“On the strength of LANARK I proclaimed Alasdair Gray the first major Scottish writer since Walter Scott. 1982 JANINE exhibits the same large talent deployed to a somewhat juvenile end.”
Anthony Burgess, The Observer
“Where LANARK was sprawling or self-indulgent, 1982 JANINE is taut, witty and deft.”
Nicholas Shrimpton, Sunday Times
“I cannot rid myself of the notion that, despite its glaring faults, which do not exclude the modishly cryptic title, this work offers more hope for the future of fiction, considered as art and vision, than the vast majority of novels published since the second world war. The chief reason for this, albeit grudging accolade is that 1982, JANINE is about the world as it is rather than as it used to be … It’s a pity … that Mr Gray is a late starter. If he were a young writer just embarking on his career I would, without hesitation, predict a brilliant future for him once he had dropped irritating mannerisms and, most important, refined and strengthened his prose style.”
Paul Ableman, The Literary Review
“His style is limpid and classically elegant.”
William Boyd, The Times Literary Supplement
“Gray is an authentically Rabelaisian writer, meaning not just that his work is bawdy and exuberant but that he is in love with the power of language to encompass life … Here is an original and talented writer, plainly in his prime.”
Robert Nye, The Guardian
“There is a respectable school of thought which believes that the best thing to do with writers like Alasdair Gray is to ignore them and hope they’ll go away. Well, they won’t go away, and they take encouragement from the silence of their critics … Gray has been compared with MacDiarmid but, on closer inspection, bears a close resemblance to the Scottish buffoon, Compton Mackenzie. Those who have seen him on television will know the kind of chap he is. A vainglorious lout … the sort of writer who continually practises his speech for the Nobel Prize in front of the mirror. And he may well get to deliver it, for he is a profoundly reactionary penman … There is nothing here to differentiate 1982 JANINE from the cruelty, stupidity, and moral fascism to be found in trash like ‘Suedehead’,‘Skinhead’ and paperbacks aimed at the young and uneducated.”
Joe Ambrose, Irish Sunday Tribune
“I have read reviews
of these books which make me suspect that the commentators had never read them. 1982 JANINE is not pornography but a thoughtful and sad study of the human predicament; to be trapped in a world where the little man, woman or country will always be exploited by the big bullies.”
J. A. McArdle, Irish Independent
“If Alasdair Gray were a pornographer he would be rather a good one. He is not a pornographer, however. His power to titillate is betrayed by humour and pathos, the worst enemies of true porn. Humour is what makes the book bearable, though Gray’s humour is very Scottish – that is to say, black.”
George Melly New Society
“As it develops, 1982 JANINE becomes a polemic of a good-hearted, old-fashioned kind, cheerfully enlivened by merry typographical japes, some of which need a magnifying glass to decipher, and including a sad little tale of true love lost through a young man’s silly snobbery. But afterwards, not much remains. It is like a brilliant theatrical occasion that holds the audience riveted at the time but leaves them wondering, on the way home, what it all added up to.”
Nina Bawden, Daily Telegraph
“The fragmented style may suggest Joyce and Beckett, but it becomes apparent that it owes more to the Scottish tradition which juxtaposes stark realism and wild fantasy and descends from Dunbar and David Lindsay, through Urquhart and Smollett to Scott, Stevenson and George Douglas Brown.”
Seumas Stewart, Birmingham Post
“His fictions seem easily to inhabit all possible literary worlds, potent hybrids in a class of their own.”
William Boyd, The Tatler
DK–7200 Grindsted
Denmark
July 26th 1984
Dear Mr Gray,
This is one of those boring letters where someone who likes your books writes to you to tell you so – so if that sort of thing gives you the creeps, ditch it! And, no, I haven’t written a novel of my own, so I’m not writing to ask how to get it printed.
I bought JANINE on the knowledge of your name, and not because some hurried crit said it was pornographic. He either did this because he’s only dipped into one chapter, or in the hope of stimulating sales and doing you a favour – perhaps both.
And my goodness what an enthralling book – the unities! – particularly the evolution of character. Marvellous! In 1949 I went to do my National Service, at Catterick, and one of my best mates came from Cotton Road, and we used to go to ‘the jiggin” at Rutherglen Town Hall. Also, my uncle Billie Barrie, of Kilsyth, was Chief Cashier on the Glasgow Corp. tramways, so there’s hardly a mile of route, or an inch of ferry I haven’t been on (in 1950/51) in either the one company or the other. So I could ‘follow’ you, and have the accents in my head.
Funny you remembered there were trams (most authors don’t!). Getting off at Waverley what I noticed about the Edinburgh cars was not so much their funereal colours – after all, lots of Corporation buses and trolley-buses down in England looked exactly the same – but how old they looked. Up in Aberdeen, one sizzled about in super streamliners; in Glasgow mad wee Irish girls who could only just see over the controls drove Coronation cars at 70 m.p.h. along the Paisley Road Toll at night – and then you got to Edinburgh, and tall, creaking cars, with an open front step, rumbled gently up, looking like something out of a Will Rogers silent film.
And Denny’s never particularly articulate command of the language utterly deserting her in crises, and her reverting to keening or a primitive steam-whistle shriek. You certainly dredged up memories there (Dundee, 1953 – and I thought I’d long forgotten!).
Once or twice I thought you were betraying the Suspension of Disbelief conspiracy by talking directly to the reader (of course we really know this is only a story, a la Salman Rushdie) but I slowly twigged it was the dialogue with God. Sorry about that.
For chapter seven you claim inspiration from the programme note to Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique – one of my favourite bits (bits? how many symphonies would like to be called a ‘bit?’) of music. Did you know that Berlioz, in his original programme (which he later swopped round the order of) took the note direct from Beethoven’s Pastoral? Yes, well …
Thanks for a most enjoyable, and challenging, tour inside someone’s very believable head.
Yours sincerely
David Clayre
About The Author
1982, JANINE
Alasdair Gray was born in Glasgow in 1934. He was educated at Whitehill Senior Secondary School and studied drawing and painting at the Glasgow School of Art from 1952–7. After Art School he worked as a part-time art teacher and on commissions for portraits and murals. During this time he was also writing short stories and a semi-autobiographical novel which changed and developed through several drafts over the course of twenty years, to become Lanark. After training at Jordanhill in 1960 he taught art in Glasgow schools for the next two years before going on to make a difficult living as an artist, a writer, a scene painter and part-time lecturer. Gray married Inge Sørensen in 1962 and the couple had a son in 1964 but were divorced in 1970. In 1968 his play The Fall of Kelvin Walker was broadcast on BBC TV. In the 1970s Gray was attending Glasgow University lecturer Philip Hobsbaum’s creative writing sessions, in a group which included Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead and James Kelman. During this period he wrote several plays for radio and television, some of which were done on stage, while he continued to paint and to work on murals. (Some of his murals can still be seen at Palace Rigg Nature Reserve in Cumbernauld, in Abbots House local history museum in Dunfermline, and in the Ubiquitous Chip restaurant in Glasgow.) Gray’s first novel, Lanark, was published by Canongate in 1981 to widespread critical acclaim, followed by short stories in Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), his second major novel 1982, Janine (1984), The Fall of Kelvin Walker as a novel (1985), and Lean Tales (with Agnes Owens and James Kelman) in the same year.
Gray’s work is characterised by an exuberant imaginative energy, which uses fantasy and fabulation to good-humoured effect, while never losing sight of his darker and more critical sense of the effects of personal, cultural, and political alienation in the modern world. Technically his books make free use of meta-narrative games, typographical effects, mock scholarly addenda and his own fine and complex illustrations.
Gray produced a brief Saltire Self Portrait in 1988 and a collection of poems, Old Negatives, appeared in 1989, with McGrotty and Ludmilla (the novel version of a play written in 1975) and the novel Something Leather in 1990. A wholly original revision of the Frankenstein theme featured in the novel Poor Things (1992) and further short stories were published as Ten Tales True and Tall (1993), with two further books A History Maker (1994) and Mavis Belfrage (1996). A polemical essay Why Scots Should Rule Scotland was published in 1992 and revised in 1997. His most recent works are The Book of Prefaces: A History of English Literature from the 7th to the 20th Century (2000) and A Short Survey of Classic Scottish Writing (2001). Gray’s fiction has been translated into more than a dozen languages throughout the world, including Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Japanese, Swedish and Serbo-Croatian.
Copyright
First published as a Canongate Classic simultaneously
in Great Britain and the United States in 2003
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
First published in 1984
by Jonathan Cape, London
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © Alasdair Gray, 1984
Introduction copyright ©Will Self, 2003
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general
subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards
the Canongate Classics series and a specific grant
towards the publication of this title
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
re
quest from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 444 9
www.meetatthegate.com