George Friel
MR ALFRED M.A.
A NOVEL
Introduced by Douglas Gifford
Contents
Introduction
MR ALFRED M.A.
Introduction
Arguably, the writing of George Friel (1910–75) is far more widely known today than it was during the author’s lifetime. His short stories were finally collected and published in book form in 1992, a mere eighteen years after his death and more than half a century after their author had originally planned to publish a collection of stories. His first novel, The Bank of Time (1959), finally made it into paperback in 1994–await of only thirty-five years. The appearance of this collection of his three greatest novels may now accelerate the slow process of popularisation of a still-neglected literary canon.
In his lifetime, Friel was a prophet without much honour in his own country. He found it very hard indeed to get his work published. His inscription to a good friend inside the copy of his novel Grace and Miss Partridge (1969) nicely summarises some of the frustrations he encountered getting his work into print:
In explanation of the long delay
I wrote a story in 63
about a partridge in a bare tree.
I typed it clear in 64
and tried my publishers once more.
Back it came in 65 –
Ah well, I said, I’ll still survive.
It lay unread till 66
till Mrs Boyars1, promising nix,
asked to see it again in 67,
accepted it – so all forgiven.
I got no proofs till 68
and that was November, rather late.
Printed at last in 69,
so now it’s yours as well as mine.2
The novel in question was not written by an unknown writer. It was to be George Friel’s third published novel, and it followed the minor triumph of The Boy Who Wanted Peace (1964), a book which received wide acclaim from mainstream critics and fellow writers, and one which was compared favourably with Brighton Rock, Lord of the Flies and A Clockwork Orange, among others. And yet the publisher prevaricated.
The author, for his part, was no trimmer before the winds and fads of literary fashion. He was the uncompromising realist who also penned the lines:
Seven times I wrote this story,
Not for cash or fame or glory,
Just to get the telling right
Though it never see the light.
If it’s printed I confess Truly
I could not care less.3
All of Friel’s writing is based on Glasgow, its new housing schemes, its industrial wastelands, its blackboard jungles, the nooks and crannies of its closes and sandstone tenements. No writer can paint this landscape with more laconic authority or grim humour. Friel tried to describe this world ‘like it was’, unvarnished and unidealised. Defending himself from the accusation that his fictional world was bleak and depressing, he asked rhetorically, ‘What am I going to do? Put my head in the sand and say that everything is lovely? Surely a novelist, even in Glasgow, if he is writing about contemporary life, must tell the truth as he sees it. If I could see a lot of sweetness and light in Glasgow I would be happy to write about it: this is life. If you say what is going on then something might get done. But if you play Mr Glasgow and pretend that it’s a fine warm-hearted city then you are kidding yourself, kidding the public, and pledging the future to no reform.’ (Interview in The Guardian, 24 March 1972.)
After Glasgow, a second key theme of George Friel’s fiction is the world of Scottish education. If they read no other fiction in the course of their studies, all trainee teachers should read the novels of Friel. They tell us more about the Scottish school system of the 1950s and ’60s than any history book could – and, by extension, offer us much to ponder regarding the kind of school system we have today. When the psychiatrist asks Mr Alfred why he doesn’t like the new methods and new schemes of work in his profession, Mr Alfred explains: ‘Well … all that’s said in their favour is that they’re new. I don’t like that. It’s not a reason.’ (p. 584) What would Mr Alfred – in his own literary way, a champion of traditional values – make of the current orthodoxies of Scottish education, after a further quarter of a century of relentless novelties?
Like Friel, many modern Scottish writers have been teachers by profession. One thinks of Sorley Maclean and Norman MacCaig, Robin Jenkins and Iain Crichton Smith, to name but a few. But unlike any of these writers, the world of school is uniquely central to Friel’s novels and stories. School in his fiction is a metaphor for the uneasy relationships between the adolescent and the adult world, whether individual or institutional. At the individual level, Percy Phinn is the not-quite adult leader of the Brotherhood in The Boy Who Wanted Peace, whose authority over the gang rests on the fact that he is bigger and older than his schoolboy rank-and-file; likewise Miss Partridge’s potentially sinister hold over Grace; and Mr Alfred’s more innocent infatuation with Rose Weipers.
Friel tried for an authentic picture of the school system he worked within. He had no wish to demonise or idealise it. Sometimes the picture he painted went too close to the bone for the apologists for the system, and he was certainly no friend of political correctness. It seems fairly clear that Friel blames the system for failing to face the facts of the situation it had to cope with. As he rambles semi-coherently at the apocalyptic end of the book, Mr Alfred finds a piece of chalk in his pocket, and this sets him off:
‘Talk and chalk,’ he said. ‘That’s me. Out-of-date. The child is master of the man. New methods. Visual aids. Projects. Research. Doesn’t matter half the bastards can’t read. Do research just the same. Discover Pythagoras’ theorem for themselves. Could you?’ (p. 575)
Or again:
‘You must never say a child is stupid,’ said Mr Lindsay. ‘There are no stupid children, just as there are no bad children.’
‘But there are,’ said Mr Alfred. ‘Whether you believe in original sin or believe in evolution, you can’t deny there’s wickedness and stupidity in the world.’
‘You know that and I know that,’ said Mr Lindsay. ‘But the top brass won’t admit it. They’ve never worked nine to four, Monday to Friday in a classroom. They talk as if there was only a shower of little Newtons and Einsteins who haven’t had a fair chance because you didn’t teach them right.’ (pp. 543–4)
Miss Seymour, ‘airy-mannered, brisk-moving, swift-speaking and fully fashionable’, sums it all up:
‘Spelling and grammar don’t matter … just as long as they write something. Creative activity, that’s what counts … What you see there is what the inspectors want. This is the day of the child- dominated classroom.’ (pp. 545–6)
It is in this strange world that Mr Alfred is drowning:
Mr Alfred didn’t like it. He wanted to teach. But nobody wanted to learn. He knew it was his job to make them. He tried. He failed. It was like talking into a phone with nobody at the other end. (p. 543)
It is not only Mr Alfred who illustrates the challenges of teaching. Mr Daunders, headteacher in The Boy Who Wanted Peace, is another well-sketched character. Like Percy Phinn, Mr Daunders too wants ‘peace and quiet to sit in the sun and read’ (p. 167). He spends much time lamenting his fate:
… he sighed at the destiny that had condemned him to be a headmaster in a small primary school in one of Glasgow’s wild-life reservations, a pocket of vandalism, a pool of iniquity. (p. 68)
The school in Tulip Lane provides centre stage for the action of The Boy Who Wanted Peace; here Percy’s late father had been janitor and his mother was a cleaner; in its basement, among the old Sunshine Readers and boxes of stage props, is concealed the robbers’ loot; Percy himself is a former pupil and his gang are pupils of
the school. Similarly in Mr Alfred M.A., Collinsburn Comprehensive, Waterholm Comprehensive, and the vandalised annexe of Winchgate Primary are key locations. It is no exaggeration to say that the smells of childhood – of school corridors, playgrounds and classrooms – haunt and pervade the pages of two of these three books.
It is maybe not entirely surprising that one of the young George Friel’s literary heroes was James Joyce. Appropriately enough for a son of first-generation Donegal emigrant parents, George’s notebook sketches indicate plans to write a Glasgow version of Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), and in some respects his short stories of the 1930s stand comparison with Joyce’s classic collection. In the novels represented in this publication, there are explicit references to Finnegans Wake (1939) in Grace and Miss Partridge; and to Stephen Dedalus in Mr Alfred M.A., as well as a quote by Mr Alfred – he ‘had silence and exile, but no cunning’ – from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). And at the end of Mr Alfred’s story, the scene in the mental hospital with the two psychiatrists is straight out of the work of another James Joyce fan – Samuel Beckett. It is to the work of these writers that George Friel’s fiction seems most akin, rather than to that of his Scottish contemporaries.
Some of the wordplay of Friel’s writing echoes Joyce and Beckett in its economy and exactness, and occasionally in its poetry:
Still, with his usual politeness he answered insincerely, or with his usual insincerity he answered politely. (p. 392)
A ruffled hen laying a complaint and making a song about it. (p. 406)
Tordoch … became a waste land of bracken and nettles surrounded by a chemical factory, gasworks, a railway workshop and slaghills. At that point the town council took it over for a slum-clearance scheme. They built a barrack of tenements with the best of plumbing and all mod cons and expected a new and higher form of civilisation to flare up by spontaneous combustion. (p. 408)
[Gerald Provan] grinned, hands in the pockets of his tightarsed jeans, kicking the kerb, radiant with the insolence of an antimath idling out his last term at school. (p. 414)
Wanting to kiss Rose. Rose upon the rood of time. Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days. Rose of the world, Rose of peace. Far off, most secret and inviolate Rose. (p. 468)
The linguistic distinction of Friel’s writing is consistent. Anyone picking up Mr Alfred M.A. is duly warned to be on the alert in the two pages of the book’s opening chapter:
She had always to be protecting [her son] from the malice of the world. (p. 387)
The anapaests of his bawling were hammered out by his punches. (p. 388)
… confounding her mother and her brother in one strabismic glare. (p. 388)
Friel can also be linguistically jocular, as when he describes the thug Gerald Provan in the nice zeugma ‘wearing new jeans and an old smirk’ (p. 456), or the educational spokesperson (English, of course) ‘leaving no stone unturned till she nips us in the bud’ (p. 439). Or:
He said he was sick and tired of all the feuding and fighting that was going on in the school and he was determined to stamp it out. He nearly said with a firm hand. (p. 429)
As one of the characters points out regarding Mr Alfred: ‘Half the things he said were quotations’ (p. 429). This is a very Joycean tendency, and can be both effective and amusing: ‘… there was a breathless hush in the lane that night and Mr Alfred knew his moment had come. Cowan lunged, Turnbull dodged, and Mr Alfred spoke out loud and clear’ (pp. 415–16).
The downside of Friel’s linguistic interests is most apparent in Mr Alfred M.A. It is in this work that he seems to flaunt obscure words in a manner at once ponderous and irritating, a point that was taken up by Auberon Waugh. So we have ‘He sprawled raniform’, ‘invulting arms’, ‘a newly acquired claudication’, ‘aposiopesis’, ‘palaestra’, ‘silent catatropia’, ‘nuzzer’, ‘the gamekeeper’s tetragrams’ (the famous four-letter words in D. H. Lawrence’s most notorious fiction), ‘the autochthonous tribes’, ‘imbibitions’, ‘a mammose wench … flushed with hebetic vulgarity’, ‘a perlustration of the city’, ‘a nuchal smack and an auricular threat’; and many more. All these words and phrases are appropriately defined in the Shorter Oxford; but it seems a pity to have to stop and look it up quite so frequently. Arguably, this is a sub-Joycean feature of George Friel’s writing style.
A more topical aspect of Friel’s writing style is his pioneering effort to capture in print the speech patterns of Glasgow demotic. In his use of ‘mamurrer’ (= my mother), ‘Feudcleanyurears’ (= if you’d clean your ears), ‘Hoosnagang’ (= who’s in a gang), Friel is a precursor of Tom Leonard, Stephen Mulrine, Bill Keys, Adam MacNaughtan, Margaret Hamilton and many later writers. Friel had a good ear for vernacular speech, and might well have made a reliable contributor to Michael Munro’s The Patter: A Guide to Current Glasgow Usage (1985). He also put down one or two interesting markers anent the use of Scots as opposed to standard English in schools. When, in The Boy Who Wanted Peace, the young Garson is interviewed by the headteacher about an insult which had provoked a fight with Savage,
… he couldn’t use Savage’s words. He answered in the book-English a bright Scots schoolboy uses when he talks respectfully to his teachers. ‘He accused my mother of eloping with a Negro,’ he said. (p. 102)
Savage had actually said something slightly different: ‘Yer maw ran awa’ wi’ a darkie’ (p. 87). Similarly, in Mr Alfred M.A., when the teacher grabs Gerald Provan to haul him before the headteacher, Provan says: ‘Take yer hauns aff me’.
His dialect vowels were themselves a form of insolence. Normally a boy spoke to his teacher in standard English. (p. 429)
Nowadays we tend to ask the question: Was this policy of linguistic cleansing wise?
There are of course numerous other themes and topics in this rich fictional canon awaiting the reader’s exploration. There is the violent world of graffiti-land, of the Glasgow gangs and their significance in the society which spawned them. The death of Poggie in Mr Alfred M.A. and of Donald Duthie in Grace and Miss Partridge are important events, and here again Friel tries to tell it like it is – arguably with more insight than the sociologists manage. Then there is the whole business of sanity and madness in all three novels. Is Percy quite right in the head? Is Miss Partridge? Is Mr Alfred? Is it society that is mad?
Finally, there are the great apocalyptic scenes of Annie Partridge and her ‘spectres’ (pp. 334–43) and of Mr Alfred and his doppelgänger Tod (p. 574 et seq). These seem quintessentially Scottish, in the tradition of Scott’s Wandering Willie, James Hogg’s justified sinner and R. L. Stevenson’s Tod Lapraik. It is hoped that this new edition of three important novels will renew interest in a significant contributor to Scottish literature of the twentieth century.
Gordon Jarvie
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Bank of Time (Hutchinson 1959, Polygon 1994*)
The Boy Who Wanted Peace (Calder and Boyars 1964, Pan 1972,
Polygon 1985)
Grace and Miss Partridge (Calder and Boyars 1969)
Mr Alfred M.A. (Calder and Boyars 1972, Canongate 1987)
An Empty House (Calder and Boyars 1975)
A Friend of Humanity: Selected Short Stories
(Polygon 1992)
1. Marion Boyars, of publishers Calder and Boyars, who were the publishers of four of Friel’s five published novels.
2. In an unpublished MLitt thesis, ‘George Friel: An Introduction to His Life and Work’, by Iain Cameron (Edinburgh University 1987).
3. Author’s private papers, National Library of Scotland.
*indicates work currently in print
MR ALFRED M.A.
A NOVEL
Part One
CHAPTER ONE
She passed for a widow when she went to Tordoch. She flitted across the river thinking nobody there would know her husband had left her. He was a longdistance lorrydriver, always coming or going and never saying much the few hours he was at home. He went to Manchester one
day with a load of castings and vanished, lost and gone for ever, as untraced and untraceable as those banal snows some folk keep asking about. Not that she bothered to ask. She was a working-woman with a good overtime in the biscuit factory. She could do without his wages. The manless planet of her life moved round her son Gerald. He was Gerry to his schoolmates, but never to her. She always gave him his name in full. She thought it sounded right out the top drawer that way. That was why she chose it, though neither she nor her husband had ever any Gerald among their kin. She loved her Gerald fiercely. She loved him a lot more than she loved his little sister Senga. He was a good boy to her, but too kind and gentle perhaps, too innocent. She had always to be protecting him from the malice of the world. But that’s what she was there for. He was tall for his age, blond and grinning. The girl was skinny, gin-gerhaired, crosseyed, freckled and nervous. She had loved her father because he used to cuddle her at bedtime. But after the row she got for asking where he was when they flitted she was afraid to mention his name again.
About a year later, say the week before Christmas, when she was turned eleven and Gerald was fourteen, he was thumping her hard because she wouldn’t fry sausages for him at teatime, even after he told her twice. The anapaests of his bawling were hammered out by his punches.
‘Aye, you’ll do what I say and jump up when I speak for you know I’m your boss and you’ve got to obey.’
Mr Alfred, MA Page 1