Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  OF ME AND OTHERS

  Born in 1934, Alasdair Gray graduated in design and mural painting from Glasgow School of Art. Since 1981, when Lanark was published by Canongate, he has written, designed and illustrated seven novels, several books of short stories, a collection of his stage, radio and TV plays and a book of his visual art, A Life in Pictures.

  In his own words, “Alasdair Gray is a fat, spectacled, balding and increasingly old Glaswegian pedestrian who has mainly lived by writing and designing books, most of them fiction.”

  OF ME

  AND OTHERS

  by Alasdair Gray

  for Morag, Mora, Andrew,

  Bert, Katriona, Tracy, Maff,

  Jim, Libby and Alexandra

  in Scotland

  England and the U.S.A.

  CANONGATE BOOKS

  EDINBURGH 2019

  biblio notice

  This revised edition published in

  Great Britain, the USA and

  Canada in 2019 by Canongate

  Books Ltd, 14 High Street,

  Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West

  and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada

  canongate.co.uk

  This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Alasdair Gray 2014, 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  The author gratefully acknowledges the support of

  Creative Scotland towards the publication of this book

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78689 520 2

  eISBN 978 1 78689 521 9

  an epigraph

  Everyone over middle age

  regrets some loss that ageing brings.

  My principal regret is this:

  I’ve never tackled handy things.

  Before King Louis lost his head

  his hobby was repairing locks.

  Byron, despite a crippled foot,

  wrote epics yet could swim and box.

  Sir Thomas Browne, Bill Carlos Bill,

  were medical practitioners.

  The Reverend Sydney Smith had skill

  to doctor his parishioners.

  One soldier wrote great words for tunes.1

  One housewife writes tremendous books.2

  One postman publishes cartoons.3

  One mural painter welds and cooks.4

  One sweeper of streets can etch and paint.5

  One banker played the bagpipes well.6

  One fisherman became a saint who

  holds the keys of Heaven and Hell.7

  Ruskin swept stairs and weeded plots.

  D. H. Lawrence scrubbed the floors.

  Count Tolstoy emptied chamber pots.

  Why do I flinch from household chores?

  Frosts’s farming was not infamous.

  Melville and Conrad sailed the sea.

  James Kelman drove an omnibus.

  No honest toil excuses me.

  1. Hamish Henderson

  2. Agnes Owens

  3. Stuart Murray

  4. Nichol Wheatley

  5. Alan Richardson

  6. Former manager of the Glasgow Byres Road Clydesdale Bank

  7. Peter

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  1987 Middle Age Self Portrait

  2012 ANOTHER NOT SCOTLAND

  1951–2013 CHILDHOOD READING

  1993 Childhood Writing and MR MEIKLE

  1952 Two Whitehill School Magazine Essays

  1957 EPIC PAINTING: Art School Thesis

  1959 A REPORT TO THE TRUSTEES

  1960 WORLD OF 4 TO 7: Teaching College Thesis

  1964 APOLOGY FOR MY RECENT DEATH

  1969 INSTEAD OF AN APOLOGY

  1973 Of Bill Skinner, Small Thistle

  1974 A Retrospective Catalogue – Introduction

  1975 Of Gable-End Murals – A Letter

  1975 NEW LANARK CRAFT COMMUNITY

  1977 WRITERS GROUPS and A Resident’s Report

  1978 Of Joan Ure: Playwright

  1981 LANARK: Epilogue

  1982 TWO WEE ARTICLES

  1983 Modest Proposal for Bypassing a Predicament

  1984 1982 JANINE: Epilogue

  1985 Of Alasdair Taylor, Painter

  1985 Of R. D. Laing

  1986 Of Scottie Wilson

  1986 Five Glasgow Artists Show: Catalogue Essay

  1986 Of John Glashan – A Letter

  1988 Of Ian Hamilton Finlay – A Letter

  1989 A Radio Talk on Allegory for Scottish Schools

  1990 Of Elspeth King – A Friend Unfairly Treated

  1990 MCGROTTY AND LUDMILLA: Epilogue

  1990 Preface to J. Withers’ Glasgow Archipelago

  1990 SOMETHING LEATHER: Epilogue

  1990 Of Pierre Lavalle – Catalogue Introduction

  1991 Of Andrew Sykes – Short Story Postscript

  1991 THE FALL OF KELVIN WALKER: Introduction

  1992 POOR THINGS: Acknowledgements, Prologue

  1993 Of Anthony Burgess – Obituary

  1994 Of Jack Vettriano

  1995 LEAN TALES: Postscript

  1996 Of Bill MacLellan – Obituary

  1997 WORKING LEGS: How This Play Got Written

  1999 Preface to Books of Jonah, Micah & Nahum

  2000 THE BOOK OF PREFACES: Postscript

  2000 16 OCCASIONAL VERSES: Endnotes

  2003 FIFTEENTH FEBRUARY

  2004 Of Susan Boyd – Obituary

  2004 THE DECLARATION OF CALTON HILL

  2004 Introduction to The Knuckle End

  2005 Of Philip Hobsbaum – Obituary

  2006 SELF PORTRAITURE

  2006 New Kelvingrove

  2007 LONDON WON’T LET US

  2008 Of Archie Hind – Dear Green Place Epilogue

  2008 FLECK: Postscript

  2009 OLD MEN IN LOVE: Epilogue by S. Workman

  2009 An Upper Clyde Falls Mural

  2012 Hillhead Subway Station Mural

  2013 Of John Connolly – Obituary

  2013 Of Will Self

  2013 Of Bill Hamilton

  2018 HELL: Dante’s Trilogy Part 1: Foreword

  POSTSCRIPT

  Foreword

  MY LAST BOOK WAS CALLED A Life in Pictures. This one might have been called A Life in Prose. It contains reminiscences and essays written between 1952 and 2014 about my own works and those of-friends. Marginal and footnotes give dates of writing or publication. The earliest piece is a speculative essay, apart from which the rest describe what I think facts, though readers will dismiss some as opinions. Three, though mainly factual, diverge into fiction for reasons the notes also explain. My life as a professional author connects most of them. I have improved a few sentences so that my younger self sometimes seems to write better than he did, but no other changes suggest I was wiser in those days than I am now.

  I thought this book would turn out to be a ragbag of interesting scraps. I now think it has the unity of a struggle for a confident culture, a struggle shared with a few who became good friends and thousands I have never met. Every nation has periods of lesser and greater assurance. When I was twenty-one the Scotland I knew was confident in the many goods it made and exported, but many educated people had very little confidence in Scottish visual and literary art, not because we lacked them, but because our education had stopped us seeing them. I believed all good books by Scots must be published in London and would fail if not praised by English book reviewers; also that artists wishing to live by their art had better follow the example of La
bour politicians and go to London. This explains the querulous tone of many early essays. I felt my nation was treated as a province, even by many who lived here. I wanted that to stop.

  Being twelve years old when the 2nd World War ended, I belonged to the first generation to benefit by the welfare state in both healthcare and education. Unlike post-Thatcher children we had grants to attend art schools and universities without getting into debt, and even shift from one to another. From these pre-Thatcher graduates came poets, writers and playwrights who are now part of a very loose literary and artistic establishment at home in their own land, which may again become a nation in 2015.

  A Socialist like my father, I loved Riddrie Public Library because it let anyone, but especially me, become a citizen in the world’s Republic of Letters. I referred so much to it in these essays that I have deleted most and other repetitions, filling the hole

  Alison Lumsden, my sharpest critic, says my habit of forestalling antagonistic remarks in forewords1 and postscripts2 is a cowardly ploy intended to baffle honest criticism. She is right. This ploy will get my work forgotten sooner rather than later.

  1. Such as this.

  2. See here.

  Middle Age Self Portrait

  Saltire Society was founded in 1936 by people who wished to see, “not just a revivals of the arts of the past, but a renewal of the life that made them, such as achieved by Scots in the 18th century.” It publicized new buildings, good restorations of old ones, while issuing pamphlets on Scots history, law, philosophy, famous writers, usually dead. In the 1980s it started printing autobiographical booklets about modern authors. MacDiarmid & Goodsir Smith were dead, so theirs were edited out of their personal accounts still in print. Naomi Mitchison and I wrote our own. Mine, published in 1988, was last of a series which should have continued while any Scots knew they had a literature.

  ON MONDAY, 18TH MAY, 1987, 10.30 PM. My birth certificate says I am 52 years, 167 days, 40 minutes old. My passport says I am 1.74 metres or 5 feet 9! inches tall. According to the scales in the lavatory I weigh 13 stones and 7 pounds in my socks, semmit, underpants, bath robe, national health spectacles and false upper teeth: from all of which a doctor will deduce I am not in the best of health. I have the lean, muscular legs and small bum of the brisk pedestrian but the bulging paunch of the heavy drinker, the fleshy shoulders hunched too near the ears of the asthmatic with bronchial tendencies. The neck is thick; hands and feet and genitals small; the chin strong and double with the underside not yet grossly pendulous; the moustache pale sand colour; the straight nose survives from the years when I was thin all over; the eyes are small and sunken with blue-grey irises; the brow straight and not deeply lined; the hair of the scalp is fading from nondescript brown to nondescript grey and thinning behind a slightly eroded scalp-line. In repose the expression of the face is as glum as that of most adults. In conversation it is animated and friendly, perhaps too friendly. I usually have the over-eager manner of one who fears to be disliked. When talking freely I laugh often and loudly without being aware of it. My voice (I judge from tape-recordings) is naturally quick and light, but grows firm and penetrating when describing a clear idea or recollection: otherwise it stammers and hesitates a lot because I am usually reflecting on the words I use and seeking to improve and correct them. When I notice I am saying something glib, naive, pompous, too erudite, too optimistic, or too insanely grim I try to disarm criticism by switching my midland Scottish accent to a phony form of Cockney, Irish, Oxbridge, German, American or even Scottish.

  At present I sit on a low comfortable chair in the room where most of my work and sleeping is done. I wear the aforementioned socks, semmit etcetera, and am being painted by Michael Knowles B.A. (Hons.), a quiet-spoken English artist living in Edinburgh who hopes to sell the portrait to the Royal Scottish Museum. I like and fear the idea of becoming a thing with an unliving public shape, but I obviously like it more than fear it for I am embalming myself in words for the Saltire Self-Portrait Series while Mr Knowles paints me doing it. I had planned to start less blatantly with a platitude everyone would accept, a platitude told in rhyme to make it seem original. I would then cunningly shift to an account of the people who made me, using old certificates and memories but mostly some pages my father once wrote about his early life in Bridgeton. I was reading these pages an hour ago when Mr Knowles arrived. I laid them down, we arranged the furniture to let the window-light fall equally on me and on his canvas, then the pages could not be found though we rummaged for them in all the places I could think of and a few where they could not possibly be. From childhood this habit of slyly, casually hiding valued objects from myself has deprived me, sometimes permanently, of money, travel tickets, useful tools, keys, paintings, notebooks, manuscripts and appliances to assist breathing when the asthma is bad. A psychiatrist once suggested these losses were caused by a hidden wish to attract attention and get proofs of love from those close to me. I doubt it. I have often inflicted such accidents on myself when nobody is close and nobody notices. The cause may be a sneaking appetite for disaster which Edgar Allan Poe calls The Imp of the Perverse and associates with alcoholism, irrational vertigo and procrastination. The older Freud calls it The Death Wish, perhaps too sweepingly. It has done me no lasting harm. Perhaps a defective grasp of solid externals is sometimes not caused by unconscious will, but by too much reflecting on mental innards. I’ll find the lost pages eventually. They are certainly within arm’s reach, and I may use them to add dignity to an otherwise selfish narrative.

  Meanwhile, what am I for? What does this ordinary-looking, eccentric-sounding, obviously past-his-best person exist to do apart from eat, drink, publicize himself, get fatter, older and die? Stars, herbs and cattle exist without reasons, they fit the universe wherever they occur without need of language to maintain their forms, but a born human has no foreseeable shape. It is turned into a Chinese housewife, a neolithic hunter, an unemployed car mechanic or Ludwig van Beethoven by an always changing when and where pressing on a unique yet always ripening or rotting bundle of traits: traits joined by a painfully conscious need to both stay the same and grow different. This need generates ideas, arts, sciences, laws and a host of excuses, because one of our traits is garrulity. Even in sleep we talk wordlessly to ourselves. So what are you for, Gray?

  At present I do not know. Until a few years ago I wanted to make stories and pictures. While writing or painting I forgot myself so completely that I did not want to be any different. I felt I was death’s equal. We live and have lived, die and will die in this place and millions have been and will be forgotten with hearts and faces we struggle to keep until folded in sleep or gone rotten, and most, before dying, give blood to son or daughter and when the bones of these children crumble, remain not even memories – names cut on stones, perhaps: otherwise we are a procession as featureless as water unless we get into a lasting image or repeatable pattern of words. But the most necessary and typical people are seldom commemorated in art and history which whore after the rich, the disastrous, the eccentric and love, above all, monstrous folk with one ability, one appetite so magnified that they seem mere embodiments of it – that is how our heroes and gods get made. I tried to tell convincing stories by copying into them pieces of myself and people I knew, cutting, warping and joining the pieces in ways suggested by imagination and the example of other story-makers, for I wanted to amuse, so my stories contain monsters. I do not decry them for that, but I have no new ideas for more. Can I entertain with some of the undistorted facts which generated them?

  Early last century a Scottish shepherd whose first name is now unknown fathered William Gray, a shoemaker who fathered Alexander Gray, a blacksmith in Bridgeton, east Glasgow, a district then brisk with foundries, potteries and weaving sheds. And Alexander married Jeanie Stevenson, powerloom weaver and daughter of a coalminer. She became his housewife and bore another Alexander, who became a clerk on a weighbridge on a Glasgow dock, then a private in the Black Watch regiment in France
, then a quartermaster sergeant there, then worked a machine which cut cardboard boxes in a Bridgeton factory until another world war began.

  While some of this was happening Hannah, wife of a Northampton hairdresser called William Fleming bore Henry Fleming who became a foreman in a boot-making factory, and married Emma Minnie Needham. Henry, nicknamed Harry, also became a trade-unionist, and his bosses put his name on a list of men not to be employed in English factories. He and Minnie came to Glasgow where she bore Amy Fleming who first became a shop assistant in a clothing warehouse, then married Alex Gray the folding box maker, thus becoming a housewife.

  She and Alex lived in Riddrie, a Glasgow corporation housing scheme where she bore Alasdair James Gray who became a maker of imagined objects, and Mora Jean Gray who became a physical exercise and dance teacher in Aberdeen, and married Bert Rolley from Portsmouth, a chemist who analysed polluted water. Alasdair Gray married Inge Sorenson, a nurse in an Edinburgh hospital, thus making her a housewife in Glasgow, though only for 9 years; and she bore Andrew Gray who became a supplies private in a Royal Air Force base near Inverness. But long before Mora and Alasdair got married all their working ancestors in this crowded little tale were dead, except for their father Alexander Gray. After cutting cardboard for 21 years he became manager of a hostel for munition workers, builder’s labourer, wages clerk, persuader of hoteliers to subscribe to the Scottish Tourist Board, a remover of damaged chocolate biscuits from a conveyor belt, wages clerk again, warden for the Scottish Youth Hostel Association, hill guide in mountainous parts of Britain for the Holiday Fellowship, and lastly house-husband in the polite little town in Cheshire on which Mrs. Gaskill based her novel, Cranford. He died a month before his 76th year on the fourth of March 1973.

  Here follows some of his early memories typed at my request in 1970 or 71. I have rearranged sentences in the first two paragraphs, cut out five conjunctions, replaced two pronouns by nouns, and added three commas and a period.

  NOTES ON EARLY LIFE IN GLASGOW

  BY ALEXANDER GRAY