The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  While he could bear the play, he couldn't get excited about it. Maybe that was merely the way he was just now but he didn't think so. Very few plays had nailed him to his seat. He could remember a few at random - the original London production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, productions of The Crucible and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and an amateur production of Oh What a Lovely War! Their impact stayed with him.

  And Stratford-upon-Avon was one of his favourite places. He had stood a lot of times at the interval on the outside balcony, overlooking the river. It had always been a soft summer evening. He would have a drink in his hand, talking with someone he wanted to be with and there would be ducks and swans on the river and people boating. And they would be halfway through seeing King Lear or Hamlet or Much ado About Nothing. Perhaps happiness is only realised in retrospect, for those moments seemed to him suffused with a rich and quiet joy. He was in a good place with a good person, taking a long, slow drink, and he had just been enjoying the company of the writer who meant most to him in the world and in a few minutes there was more to come. He was poised between two great pleasures and the interim was a pleasure in itself. Perhaps he would go back to Stratford soon. Whatever the production was like, you couldn't miss with Shakespeare. You were bound to come out with countless arrows of perception lodged in the mind, to be pulled out at your leisure. Great theatre was a wonderful experience.

  Bad theatre was as bad as bad art gets. You couldn't turn away from it like a painting or turn the volume down on the music centre or switch it off like the television or throw it across the room like a book. And on celluloid the actors couldn't be embarrassed. A bad play was a double torture. It trapped both the actors and the audience in it, to their mutual excruciation. He should know. He had once written a play which was put on at the Edinburgh Festival and which was so bad they should probably have issued a razor-blade with every ticket, so that the audience had a form of silent protest. He winced in the darkness. They always went out like corpses anyway.

  (‘Author! Author! Right, there he is now. Let's get the bastard.’)

  Sitting there, he knew why he had come out. The play was an excuse to be with people. It didn't matter too much in itself. Michel was probably right. He saw ‘art’, if you wanted to call it that, not as some purist abstraction but as an extension of companionship, a way to share the company of people you would never meet. Even a book was a special kind of social event. That must be why he had always enjoyed the moments that interrupted creative preconceptions with the unforeseen, the man from Porlock who had come to the door when Coleridge was writing ‘Kubla Khan’ and left him unable to finish it. He was always knocking at the door of every attempted poem or play or novel, demanding admission. Over the shoulder of every writer, some aspect of reality that was being excluded was leaning perpetually, saying, ‘What about me?’

  He remembered a night in Malta, when Gill and he were living for the summer with Don and Jennifer. That was before Megan was born. They all went one evening to an open-air production of The Merchant of Venice. It was performed in countryside outside Sliema, set among trees in the ruins of an old house, part of which provided a natural stage at the top of crumbling steps. Moths and cockroaches thronged the lighted air like unpaid extras. Animal sounds barracked the text constantly.

  It was an unexpectedly exhilarating experience, as if he were watching creativity struggle for survival in a hostile environment. The animal life didn't care about reputations. Arts Council grants, who was in or out, how they were wearing talent this year. They just got on with their own serious business, copulating and eating one another. Only the force of the creation could make it survive. It had no life-support machines of textual commentary or precious aesthetics or fashionable theory or hype. It happened like a human force in the chaos of nature and took its chances that the strength of the imagined actions and, most of all, the truth and perceptiveness of the words could withstand the erosions of chance and the infinite denial of alternative circumstance, and hold.

  They did, through a haze of insect life and above the preoccupied scutterings of animals and past the pleasure he and Gill were taking in each other. They were luxuriating in touching thighs and exchanging glances that could see far into the future of a few hours from now and he was being continuously roused by the smell of her. The fires of orgasm were already being quietly stoked. But Shakespeare could still make himself heard.

  The voice, accented as it was by the prejudices of its time, distilled an essence which survived those prejudices and helped to explain Tom's own time to him. The resonant humanity of the voice was inescapable. It did not overwhelm the distractions of the night but it was not overwhelmed by them. It took its place coherently and undeniably among them. Prospero had found another island.

  Experiencing that, Tom would reaffirm one aspect of his own problematical aesthetic. You cannot talk beyond your own time by denying its specificity. You must try to inhabit it so intensely that you may, with luck and honesty and talent, say some words that relate to any time, to the nature of times.

  That night in Malta clarified for him an afternoon in James Hamilton Junior School, Graithnock, and an evening in the Palace Theatre. Those happy Philistines wanting just to grope a girl in the shadow of Shakespeare and the woman who saw a theatre as a dormitory had been telling him something. Even them he owed.

  Like them, nature was undercutting the self-importance of humanity's sense of itself as they sat there in the dark. It wasn't life, he thought (much as he loved Camus), that was absurd. What was absurd was people's attempt to conceptualise it whole, reduce it to a philosophical order. It was the human demand to understand comprehensively that created absurdity.

  Only people had that absurd need to understand. He remembered a poem by Edmund Blunden in which the poet was embroiled in the question of who wrote Shakespeare and went out for a walk and saw a flower fulfilling itself just in growing and ‘Beheaded it for blooming insolence’. Auden in ‘Fish in the unruffled lakes’ expressed how no other creature had any problem with knowing how to be. Auden was right. Fish didn't find themselves agonising over whether they should swim left or right. They just swam, became part of their element. No Hamlets in the fishy world. ‘To swim or not to swim: that is the question’? Naw.

  The Maltese summer had been one of those times when Gill and he had found an almost complete, animal naturalness in being with each other. That was before the questions came, like assayers born of hurt, to start analysing every gesture and check out instinctive responses for dubious content. Then their interpretations of each other's actions had seemed assumptively and automatically benign.

  Why was it, he wondered, that the things which attracted couples in the first place so often become the things about each other they would want to change? The social vulnerability, the unpredictable spontaneity, the tendency to laugh without inhibition. Was it that they were conscious that what had attracted them might also attract others and, therefore, had to be camouflaged? Or was it just the irritation of another's habits which had been outgrown and which now abraded where they had once fitted comfortably?

  Why did the niceties and romantic gestures, like flowers or familiar expressions of affection, have such a positive effect at the beginning of a relationship and such counter-productive results near the end of one? Maybe then, he thought, they had been tokens of what would happen, promising potential. Later, they would be measurements of what hadn't happened, simply defined failure.

  He felt again in the darkness of the Traverse Theatre the sadness of a failed relationship, not dulled by time but sharpened by the greater understanding that time had given him. The deepest grief wasn't in the mourning for what would no longer be but, given the changed perception of your own experience, in the fear that it perhaps had never been at all and you had dreamed it. For, if she had really been who you thought she was, how was it possible for her to be who she later became? In that despair could drown all hope, all belief in the value of your personal
experience. You might suspect that you would always live in a hallucination, had been doing that all your life.

  Perhaps who you thought you were was a fiction of your own devising, a stranger neither you nor anyone else could ever quite know.

  ‘EXCUSE ME,’ THE VOICE SAID. ‘You Tom Docherty?’

  It took Tom a moment or two to come back in and land again at Heathrow. He realised how busy the airport was around him. He checked automatically that the plastic bag containing the two books was still on the ground between his legs, in front of his plastic seat.

  The man would be about fifty. He had a direct, aggressive stare, as if he wouldn't like Tom to deny it.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Tom Docherty. You him?’

  ‘That's right.’

  ‘Ah thought that. Seen ye on the telly. Back up in Scotland. Go up an’ see the mother every so often. She won't come down here to live. Ah thought it was you.'

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Ah thought it was.’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Aye.’

  It didn't sound as if this was going to be Oscar Wilde meets Bernard Shaw.

  The man started to make a come-here gesture with his right hand. Sensing danger, Tom tried to see who was being invited over. All he noticed was an undifferentiated crowd on the concourse. The man seemed to be summoning Heathrow.

  ‘Janice! Janice!’

  The man must have established contact, for he turned back to Tom.

  ‘It's the wife. She's the reader in the family. Haven't read any of your books maself. Don't have the time. But she seems to like them.’

  A businessman, Tom thought. It was probably an unwarranted assumption but he couldn't stop himself. Too often he had spoken at Burns suppers and found himself introduced afterwards to some local businessman, encased in self-esteem like ormolu, who made an act of condescension out of an ignorance of literature. ‘The wife's got a couple of your books. Don't have the time to read myself.’ The implication was that the world of commerce was where men lived. Books, like knitting patterns, were for women. Unless his book was a bestseller, and therefore became a commercial phenomenon, a male author was not clearly gendered, a psychological transvestite.

  ‘It is him,’ the man said.

  At least he gave Tom the benefit of the pronoun.

  Janice was an attractive, dark-haired woman, probably in her late forties. She was casually but expensively dressed and conspicuous with jewellery. Tom stood up awkwardly. The man, himself dressed in a style Tom thought might have been described as Armani Scruffy, seemed to be looking from one to the other expectantly. Tom had an impression that the man was looking at him and almost nodding towards the woman. It was as if he were being asked to appreciate her. He did.

  ‘It was Eddie recognised you,’ the woman said. ‘Are you really Tom Docherty?’

  ‘Guilty as charged.’

  Instinctively, she leaned forward and kissed his cheek.

  ‘I love your stuff,’ she said.

  And then she compared his work with that of an author whom he quite liked but who, he thought, was doing something entirely different. He had heard the comparison made before and had eventually decided that people who could make that comparison would probably have linked Attila the Hun with General William Booth. They both led an army. Now he erased that thought guiltily, as if he were removing an embarrassing phrase from a manuscript. He must stop judging people so hard. He liked Eddie and Janice. Why shouldn't he? They were two strangers who had gone out of their way to give him a present.

  They talked. Eddie and Janice were on their way to Magaluf. Eddie was from Partick in Glasgow. Janice was from Newcastle. They now lived in Richmond. Eddie had made his money in the building trade. They were still endearingly nonplussed at how much the money was. Their children were away from home now.

  As they talked, Tom discovered yet again how the self-regarding purity of ideology will always be called in question, if the ideologue is honest (though an honest ideologue might well be a contradiction in terms), when confronted with the complex reality of being a person. He had always had contempt for the idea of devoting your life to the making of money. Eddie had certainly done that to a fairly large extent, it would seem. Tom ought to have disliked him, according to his own rules.

  But he couldn't. It was the principle of the mole on John Benchley's left cheek. That mole had compromised his ability to believe in God. Now Eddie's slightly bulbous nose humanised a concept into doubt. These direct eyes were staring out of a man, not an idea. He had severe limitations (though maybe not as many as Tom) and those limitations were some kind of absolution, because he had so patently not acted malignly out of them. He had made his money because he thought that's what you had to do. Tom heard that in what he said and, with an unspoken apology, he removed his name from the role of philistine materialists, where he had put it.

  One conversational moment clinched it. Janice and Eddie were saying how they had considered selling up and living in Spain.

  ‘But we decided the ex-pat thing wasn't for us.’

  ‘We met some of them,’ Janice said. ‘Nice enough people. But.’

  ‘Bore ye tae death,’ Eddie said. ‘It would be like livin’ in sheltered housing.'

  ‘So we take more holidays than we used to, instead.’

  ‘An’ we can still feel we're part of the livin',' Eddie said. ‘Ah mean, that way tae live. That's not retirin’ from work. That's retirin' from life. An' tae think that the money sent by selfish bastards like that can affect the government of Scotland.'

  ‘Eddie! We don't need the swearing.’

  ‘Ah would think not,’ Tom said. ‘Eddie. Mind yer fuckin’ language.'

  They had to go. Eddie and Tom shook hands and Eddie gave Tom his card. Tom explained that he didn't have a card.

  ‘If ye're ever in London. Seeing publishers or that. Give us a phone. Ye're an hour away from Richmond, in London. Ye can come and stay. Plenty of room.’

  ‘Stacks,’ Janice said. ‘We're rattling about in that house now like peas in a drum.’

  ‘Or if ye're short of time,’ Eddie said. ‘We can come into town. We'll have a right night.’

  Tom understood suddenly another reason why he liked Eddie. It was the quality of Janice. You couldn't not like her. She wore diminishing attractiveness with careless style. She didn't try to tart it up. That was why the attractiveness stayed. She wore it as if it had merely become an accessory to the character which had grown out of it. The jewellery was there, Tom imagined, just because she liked jewellery. And there wasn't a trace of that portcullis in the eyes he had noticed in some of the well-off, as if the world couldn't quite get to them any more. She had the eyes of a younger woman, wondering still what it was about. Her money hadn't sealed her off. It had just given her an altered vantage-point, from which she continued to see how interesting things were. If someone like her could get such obvious pleasure out of being with Eddie, Eddie was doing something right, don't worry.

  She and Tom embraced briefly.

  ‘I know what I'll do,’ she said. ‘We've just got time, Eddie. I saw a copy of The Stone Dream in the bookstall. I've read it. But I'll buy another one. Read it again in Magaluf.’

  ‘Boost yer royalties, eh?’ Eddie said. ‘Ye can sign it when ye're down at our place.’

  They all agreed that's what would happen. It seemed at the time a certainty, as if the improbability of their meeting again was too remote to imagine.

  Left to his thoughts, he reflected on how lucky he had been with such chance encounters with someone who had read something he had written. They had almost all been positive. Perhaps that was just the kindness of not wanting to embarrass him. He supposed most people who took the trouble to come up and talk to you wouldn't do it to say bad things.

  (‘Excuse me. Ah saw ye from the bus there and Ah got off specially to tell you. Yer stuff's a crocka shite.’

  ‘Ah don't suppose ye want ma autograph?’)

  But an
y popularity he might have certainly didn't seem to manifest in sales. Were they all library users? His publisher had almost closed a deal once with a book club and then it fell through. That had seemed to him a significant omen at the time and he wondered about it now. He suspected it was the swear-words that had put the book club off. Was that what had doomed him to marginal sales? Had he sworn himself out of the market?

  (Dear Mark Antony,

  I suspect my literary earnings and your career have something in common - both brought to ruin by a few fucks in the wrong place.)

  He would never make serious money with writing, and surely wouldn't make it with anything else now. Why did you have to wait till you were dead before posterity got the message?

  BUT POSTERITY ITSELF IS DEAD, he would think, insofar as it can be seen as any kind of final arbiter. After all, this was posterity for the writers no longer alive and contemporary criteria seemed to be re invented by the week. The modern trend was criticism by aerosol can, the present convincing itself of its revolutionary credentials by spraying the monuments of the past with simplistic slogans. In that climate he could no longer pretend to himself that the swear-words he had used were any hindrance to acceptance. These days there were books around which had more fucks than a year in a brothel and they were doing fine. No. Don't wait for posterity. It doesn't stop here any more.

  The only motivation he could find for writing was the one with which he had started, a compulsion to try and understand the strangeness of things, a fascination with our hardly known selves.

  ‘I'M LYING ON MY BED,’ she says. ‘I've got no clothes on. I'm completely naked. I'm lying on top of the covers.’

  The lamplight filtered through the curtains is giving her skin an eerie, translucent sheen. Colour me strange. Her rumpled hair makes her look wild, a woodland creature. Her eyes seem almost phosphorescent in the semi-dark. She doesn't look as if she belongs in Graithnock but in some fable of the female. Maybe ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’.