Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  I was 44 in 1979 when this novel was completed and accepted by an Edinburgh publishing house. Two years passed before it was printed. I did not foresee that it would be a successful book but I knew that a print factory would soon be stamping paper with properly spaced type and binding it into books of 560 pages each. I imagined shelves of them in warehouses and shops, each as solid as a brick yet each containing my soul – my inner being – along with everyone and everything that had helped to make me, including (of course) every story I had enjoyed.

  This sense that my main reality would become books that would outlast my body brought peace and relaxation that were helped by a new job that, in return for a little easy, agreeable work, gave me a steady wage and an office with a view across Kelvingrove Park. I was writer in residence at Glasgow University, which meant discussing the writings of a few students who wanted my advice, but did not require me to write anything. Nor did I wish to write. I had no ideas for another story, had no intention of seeking them. I was at last free to enjoy reading for its own sake as I had done as a child. Escapist fantasy no longer interested me. I bought Ezra Pound’s complete Cantos, having gathered they were great poetry about the good and bad monetary roots of our civilisation, something we should all understand, especially since economists believe only they can do it. I also bought The Road to Xanadu by Livingston Lowes, a study of how Coleridge had come to write his great long poem and a fragment of one.

  I was not a very productive versifier, but interested in the working of creative minds.

  I found Pound’s Cantos hard going apart from the denunciation of extortionate money lending (which Marx called Capitalism) as a blight upon well-made art and building. He quoted Chinese and Renaissance scholars, founders of the USA republic and examples of Mussolini’s public work schemes in many pages, amounting, in my mind, to a formless, confusing fog. But suddenly a line from one of his Chinese Cantos spoke clear sense to me:

  Moping around the Emperor’s court, waiting for the order-to-write.

  The last three words were obviously hyphenated because they were translations of one Chinese word. This suggested a highly cultured, hierarchic empire which might train a man from infancy to be its greatest poet, and flatter him with high rank and privileges, yet prevent him from writing a word before it wants a poem to justify the government’s most appalling crime. I lifted a pen, wrote these sentences –

  Dear mother, dear father, I like the new palace. It is all squares like a chessboard. The red squares are buildings, the white squares are gardens…

  – and started inventing another new world elsewhere. Livingstone Lowes’ book had also stimulated this by showing that more exotic domains than Kubla Khan’s had gone into making Coleridge’s great poetic fragment. There was the artificial paradise in the Atlas Mountains where assassins were trained, the happy valley where Abyssinian princes were confined, a sacred Himalayan grotto and a source of the Nile. This was reviving in a middle-aged man the pleasures of childhood den-making and every lost, secret, romantic world that had once entertained him in books, comics and films. I enjoyed giving my dumb poet a luxurious apartment, garden and servants, and inventing the cruel education that qualified him for these privileges, and revealing the huge confidence trick through which the vast, exploitive empire was ruled, since the Emperor turns out to be a puppet managed by ventriloquists. I believe that, for its length, Five Letters from an Eastern Empire is my best story.

  After its publication in 1983 a producer in Scottish BBC Radio decided to broadcast it, and asked if I would like the reader to be a particular actor. I suggested Bill Paterson. “But surely he has a Scottish voice?” said the producer, who was English. I said, yes, Bill Paterson had a Scottish voice, but there were many Scottish accents, both local and general – my narrator was a high-class mandarin, and Scotland had many mandarins in its universities, and Bill Paterson could easily sound like one of them. “But your narrator is supposed to be the Poet Laureate of a great empire!” said the producer, who obviously thought it irrelevant that Britain now had none, so had the story recorded in London by an English actor. That broadcast won the approval of Rodger Scruton, a Conservative critic who thought the story a satire on Communism. A friend who later attended an international literary conference told me he had heard a Chinese and Japanese scholar discuss which of their nations my empire resembled. I told him I thought it was very much like Britain.

  Childhood Reading

  These are answers to a questionnaire sent to secondary schools, either by the Department of Education for Scotland, or else the Glasgow part of it, to find how much the pupils had read of well respected authors. The questionnaire, headed Whitehill Senior Secondary School Report on Reading may even have been devised by the teachers of English (Mr Meikle among them) who gave them out. I made this the start of an essay Robert Crawford asked me to write for a new journal, Scotlands, he was editing. The University of Edinburgh was the publisher. It later became Scottish Studies Review. First printed in 1994. The article here is a wee bit enlarged. Robert had also been Mr Meikle’s pupil when both were at Hutcheson’s, the Grammar School, as good 2ndary schools were once called.

  THE FOLLOWING REPORT on my reading was made near the end of my 16th year in September 1951, and retained by my English teacher, Mr Meikle, whose widow gave it to me after his death in the spring of 1993.

  It was written with a steel-nibbed pen dipped in a squat glass bottle (if I wrote at home) or (if I wrote at school) into an inkwell – a truncated cone of glazed white earthenware less than two inches high, whose wide end was closed by a glazed white earthenware disc, slightly more than an inch in diameter, a disc with a hole in the centre to admit the pencil and a projecting tip all round which let it hang smugly in the circular hole cut for it in our desk tops. In 1951 ball point pens had been commercially marketed for several years, but most British schools forbade their use because it would reduce the quality of our handwriting. In those days most employers still preferred clerks whose penwork was clear and elegant, so schools encouraged it. In 1951 my writing, like nowadays, was very clear but not at all elegant, having changed little since I learned to draw words when four or five. The letters are distinctly shaped and connected, but the loops of a, d, g and q are almost circular, with oval ascending loops, as are the ascending and descending loops of f, g, h, j, k and l. All ascenders and descenders are short. I could never slope the vertical strokes slightly to the right as we were urged, so my vertical strokes are exactly so, or incline as much to the left as the right.

  I am almost certain the manuscript I gave to Mr Meikle was copied out at home from an earlier, messier attempt. I was as prone then to afterthoughts as I am still, and though the spaces left for book titles after the authors names were all the same size, the titles written in are all written without a blot or correction.

  SCOTT – None.

  JANE AUSTEN – None.

  DICKENS – The Christmas Books. Barnaby Rudge. Little Dorritt. Oliver Twist. David Copperfield. The Pickwick Papers.

  THACKERAY – The Rose and The Ring.

  CHARLOTTE BRONTE – Jane Eyre.

  EMILY BRONTE – Wuthering Heights.

  GEORGE BORROW – Lavengro. Romany Rye.

  MEREDITH – The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

  R. L. STEVENSON – Treasure Island. Kidnapped. Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The Master of Ballantrae. A Child’s Garden of Verses. Virginibus Pueresque.

  TROLLOPE – None.

  HARDY – None.

  BARRIE – None.

  KIPLING – Just So Stories. The Jungle Books. Puck of Pooks Hill. Stalky and Co. Seven Seas.

  CONAN DOYLE – The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. A Study in Scarlett. The Sign of Four. The Lost World. The Poison Belt.

  CONRAD – Youth. Casper Ruiz. The Shadow Line. Under Western Eyes. Chance. Last Essays.

  SHAW – The Black Girl in Search of God. (Here follows the titles of the 43 plays Shaw had published in 1934, and I had read in a book my father owne
d, to which I added:) Scraps and Shavings. An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Capitalism, Socialism and Fascism.

  H. G. WELLS – The Time Machine. Collected Short Stories. The Invisible Man. The War of the Worlds. The First Men on the Moon. The Island of Dr. Moreau. The Food of the Gods. The History of Mr. Polly. Tono Bungay. The King Who Was a King. A Study of History. An Experiment in Autobiography. The Shape of Things to Come.

  JACK LONDON – None.

  SIEGFRIED SASSOON – None.

  H. V. MORTON – None.

  WODEHOUSE – None.

  BENNETT – The Card.

  BUCHAN – The Thirty Nine Steps. Prester John. The Powerhouse. Greenmantle.

  HUGH WALPOLE – Mr Perrin and Mr Trail. Jeremy.

  NEIL MUNRO – The Daft Days.

  OTHER AUTHORS AND TITLES – Voltaire’s Candide. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Sentimental Journey. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Fielding’s History of Jonathon Wilde The Great. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Hugo’s Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford. Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass. Kingsley’s Waterbabies, unabridged. Huxley’s Brave New World, Ape and Essence. Orwell’s Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People. Edward Lear’s The Complete Nonsense. Hendrick Van Loon’s Home of Mankind, Story of Mankind, Arts of Mankind, Liberation of Mankind. Goethe’s Faust Part I.

  The above list was not wholly truthful as I wanted my teachers to think me a greater scholar than I was – a greater scholar than they were. I had read only a little beyond the start of Barnaby Rudge and Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. I stopped reading the first because I am impatient of man-made mysteries and Dickens’ 18th century convinced me less than Conrad’s. I recoiled from the second because I hated to read of lives ruined early by treachery. Nor had I read Arnold Bennett’s The Card. I had heard a radio talk on it with dramatized excerpts, and knew I could answer questions on it that would satisfy any adult.

  Nor had I read more than a few pages of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Capitalism etcetera. To this day I cannot thoroughly read a work of politics, sociology or philosophy which does not describe particular instances. Shaw’s treatise may have had many, but his title made me doubt that. But I had read enough to grasp and believe that the more just society is, the more essential to it is everyone’s work, and the more equal are their incomes, which I still believe. And I had only dipped into a few chapters of Well’s Study of History in the Pelican paperback version.

  Explaining how, and where, and when I came to read the other books would take at least a year, so I will comment on very few. The complete plays of Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen stood on the middle shelf of a bookcase in my parents, beside Carlyle’s French Revolution, Macauleys Essays, The History of the Working Classes in Scotland and Our Noble Families by Tom Johnson, a Thinkers library volume called Humanities Gain from Unbelief, an anthropology of extracts from atheists called Lift Up Your Heads, a large blue-grey bound volume with The Miracle of Life stamped in gold on the spine. This contained essays on The Dawn of Life, What Evolution Means, Life That Has Vanished, Evolution as The Clock Ticks, The Animal Kingdom, The Plant Kingdom, Man’s Family Tree, Races of Mankind, The Human Machine at Work, Psychology Through the Ages, Discoverers of Life’s Secrets. The 476 pages (excluding the index) were half given to black and white photographs and diagrams. The middle shelf also held Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism and The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God.

  The last was perhaps the first adult narrative brought to my attention at the age of three or four. I cannot remember that though was told of it later. I recall discovering it in my middle teens among my dad’s books and enjoying it greatly. He then told me he had read it to me when I was wee. The story is an evolutionary fable about human faith, told through the quest of a black girl through the African bush. Converted to Christianity by an English missionary she sets out to find God, but doubting he can be found on earth, and encounters in various dealings the gods of Moses, Job and Isaiah, then meeting Ecclesiastes the Preacher, Jesus, Mahomet, the founders of the Christian sects, an expedition of scientific rationalists, Voltaire the sceptic and George Bernard Shaw the socialist, who teach her that God should not be searched for but worked for, by cultivating the small piece of world in our power as intelligently and unselfishly as possible.

  The moral of this story is as high as human wisdom has reached, but I cannot have grasped it then. My father told me that I kept asking, “Will the next god be the real one daddy?” No doubt I would have liked the black girl to have at last met a universal maker like my father: vaster, of course, but with an equal vital sense of my importance. I’m glad he did not teach me to believe in that, for I would have had to unlearn it. But my first encounter with this book was in a prehistory I have forgotten or suppressed, though I returned to it later. It was a beautifully made book with crisp clear black-woodcuts decorating covers, titlepage and text. These were by a young artist called Farrel, obviously influenced by Eric Gill, and like the text it blended the mundane and exotic. A few days ago I learned how closely Shaw worked with Farrel, suggesting some illustrations with preliminary sketches of his own, as Lewis Caroll had worked with Tenniel on the Alice books.

  This was all on the middle shelf of the bedroom bookcase. The shelf above was blocked by orange-red spines of Left Wing Book Club, four fifths of it being the collected works of Lenin in English: dense text with no pictures or conversations in at all. The bottom shelf was exactly filled by the Harmsworth Encyclopedia, because the bookcase had been sold along with the Encyclopedia by the publisher, who owned the Daily Record in which they were first advertised. This contained many pictures, mostly grey monochrome photographs, but each alphabetical section had a complex line drawing in front, a crowded landscape in which an enthroned figure representing Ancient History (for example) was surrounded by orders of Architecture, an Astronomical telescope, glimpses of Australia and the Arctic with Amundsen, and an Armadillo and Aardvarks rooting around a discarded anchor. I gathered that these volumes contained explanations of everything there is and had been, with lives of everyone important. The six syllables of the name EN-CY-CLO-PAED-I-A seemed to sum up these thick brown books which summed up the universe. Saying them gave me a sense of power confirmed by pleasure this gave my parents. But the four colour plates showing flags of all nations and heraldic coats-of-arms gave an undiluted pleasure which was purely sensuous. I was fascinated by the crisp oblongs holding blues, reds, yellows, greens, blacks and whites combining in patterns more vivid and easily seen than any where else, apart from our Christmas decorations.

  I found a similar but more complex pleasure in Wills cigarette picture cards, gathered for me by my father into slim little squareish pale grey albums costing a penny, when empty. There was an album for Garden Flowers, Garden Hints, British Wild Animals, Railway Equipment, Cycling and Aircraft of the Royal Airforce. These cards, five to each page, were windows into places where weather was always a bright afternoon and everything was in best condition. Cigarette card albums, encyclopedias and The Miracle of Life are still a source of information and imagery for me, though I have since added others. Together with The Black Girl in Search of God they occupied the place an illustrated family bible may have held in the lives of my father’s parents, who died before I was born.

  From my four and a half years before the Second World War began – or from the five years before it hotted up – I also remember a big book of Hans Andersen fairy tales, well illustrated, which must have been read to me because I cannot remember not knowing The Marsh Kings Daughter and The Brave Tin Soldier and The Tinderbox and The Little Match Girl and The Snow Queen and The Little Mermaid and their mingling of magic with the ordinary urban and domestic, and their terrible sad sense of how quickly things change and are lost t
o faithful people whose affections do not. There were flower-fairy books, Rupert Bear annuals (also in sunny colours) Milnes’ House at Pooh Corner and two Christoper Robin verse books. All these books were left behind when we flitted from our home until the war ended, spending the last three or four years of it in Wetherby, a Yorkshire market town.

  And there I read with delight Lofting’s Dr Doolittle books, Kipling’s Just So Stories, Thackeray’s The Rose and The Ring (all illustrated by their authors), the Alice books, and Kingsley’s Waterbabies in (as I was careful to mention in the 1951 school reading report) the unabridged version. Also The Wind in the Willows, though a chapter called The Piper at the Gates of Dawn embarrassed and annoyed me. I dislike mysteriously superior presences. With the exception of Wind in the Willows and Thackeray’s book all these had (like Shaw’s Black Girl fable) encyclopedic scope, mingling people, animals and magic, going under the earth and soaring over it, making as free with time and space as any Indian or African creation myth, or Paradise Lost, or Goethe’s Faust, or Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. And all these books were strengthened by artfully blending the impossible and normal. That the fairy-tale tyrant of Crim Tartary should be a very commonplace Victorian pater familias at home – that, even so, when unexpectedly enchanted by a lovely chambermaid he instinctively proposed in Shakespearian rhyming couplets to marry her after drowning his first wife – seemed to me wonderfully comic. It was incredible but appropriate.