FOUR WEEKS AGO I ended a job that left me feeling slightly guilty, a play about a modern love affair. The setting was any town with an adult education college. I am Scottish but set it in England. Most authors set their fictions on their native soil because the familiar is often more easily imagined by them and their audiences, but Shakespeare set good plays in Scotland, Denmark and Italy, Brecht some others in England, Italy, the U.S.A. and China. My guilt derived from a meeting last November with a London BBC television producer.
I wanted him to commission a play from me. I knew the main characters and how they would interact, but not much more when the producer asked where I would locate the play, since the actor’s accents would largly indicate that. I thought a little; then said that, like Miss Julie by Strindberg, it was a play about tension between social classes. My heroine could be posh English, but the accents of the hero and his father should be from an exact British location. The producer said the BBC would commission my play if the location was English. This was because most British viewers live in the south around London, where it has been found that Scottish voices in a play inclines them to switch their channel. But some recent books and films (Room at the Top, Billy Liar, A Taste of Honey) had shown that even Londoners could enjoy other English settings, so my play could be located in Yorkshire or anywhere south of the Scottish border.
Did I say that for South Britain to declare itself the only area of dramatically useable life was despotic provincialism at its smuggest? Did I say that attitude led to the neglect and depression of life in all but the wealthiest part of the British archipelago? No. I said that as a child I had lived for three years in Yorkshire so would set my play there if the BBC would commission it. A contract was signed, the play written and the script posted to the Shepherd's Bush TV centre.
Scotland has only two training colleges of the sort where a love affair between my hero teacher and heroine student could happen. Such affairs are frequent, and those who like to believe plays are based on real events will have less room to speculate with the English location. To avoid the distraction of such speculations James Joyce lived thirty years in Trieste, Switzerland and Paris while writing four books set in his native Dublin. That has nothing to do with my guilt. To explain it I must first say what drama is and does.
It is a public performance exciting onlookers. Defined thus, theatre, film and television provide a small fraction of a dramatic world containing football and every other sport. Weddings and funerals are drama, especially the church kind, which is why many non-christians prefer them. So are ship launchings, all processions, strikes, protests meetings, trials and everything else reported upon or broadcast as news, including crimes, fires, floods, plagues, earthquakes, wars and other disasters.
Am I stretching the word too far? A play succeeds by amusing the audience. A strike can interest many but succeeds for the strikers if they win higher wages, for the employers if the strikers are defeated. The climax of Hamlet and a stabbing in a dance hall may enthral onlookers for similar reasons, but murder in a stage play kills nobody. My definition lumps the real with the imaginary in a manner unfair to both. True, but I am not considering events from the viewpoint of those enacting them, but from the bystanders viewpoint, which in real life is mostly irresponsible. Television has increased irresponsible viewing. For almost everyone the difference between the speeches of King Lear and Harold Wilson is a difference of dramatic quality. Both are nominal rulers of Britain who find themselves impotent in the face of events. Lear has the advantage of a superior script writer but Harold's drama has the advantage of suspense. We don't yet know the end.
This may sound like a metaphor but in the ancient Greek democracies it was a reality. Parliament was held in the civic theatre. Everyone not a slave, child or woman could speak and vote there. If a fishmonger thought of a fairer way to collect taxes he could take the stage and explain it. If a majority liked the scheme he would be put in charge of tax-collecting and would take the rap if his method failed. In more sophisticated societies it takes revolutions to put the population on the stage, a process so strenuous that few nations have more than one big revolution per century. No matter how costly the seats and poor the play, most of us, most of the time, want to be just audience.
But onlooking is not simple escapism. Our stage is the world, the plot is history whose drama is the sum of our lives, and we want to see our own place in it. We are partly at the mercy of mysterious forces like the American defence-policy, and the ownership of oil wells, but are also affected by much nearer things – local council meetings, the structure of multi-storey flats, and much else not always reported in the daily news. In democracies these public matters exist for the audience, not vice-versa. Politicians can seldom do more than their supporters will let them. Even the most conspicuous events depend on such intimate private things as how people earn their livings, love their wives and children, what they think about their bosses and neighbours.
The essential details of our lives only convincingly appear in good novels and dramas especially written for the stage or broadcasting networks. An adequate reporter deals with public events, an adequate author deals with what mostly happens in private because here are roots of everything eventually accepted as history.
I say ‘adequate’ rather than ‘great’ because art does not always need genius to make it effective. Over twelve years ago a play and two novels made a considerable stir in Britain. Look Back in Anger, Lucky Jim and Room at the Top. These were not great literature but they were important, esepcially when turned into films. Government grants to education at the end of World War II had let an unprecedentedly large number of working-class boys and girls achieve professional qualifications. This multitude was in a historically unique position, a position which had been planned by a government and could be demonstrated statistically. Yet this multitude was a dispersed crowd of individuals until the rant of Jimmy Porter and the funny faces of Jim Dixon made them known as a class and gave them confidence. This is the best thing plays can do: show people they are parts of a larger society and excite them into confidence.
Which returns me to the play I set in an English rather than Scottish suburb, and to guilt about this which still haunts me. I don't blame the producer. He was English, and spoke for an English majority who wanted the excitement of viewing themselves. Maybe a Scottish majority also prefer watching the English. Perhaps (outside football matches and historical serials) we feel too commonplace to be interesting. If my play had been set in Scotland, and been transmitted, and been good, it would have shown this was not the case. Even if it had been only partly good it would have shown some vitality in a depressed area. As Hugh MacDiarmid has written
Inadequate maps are better than no maps
At least they show that the land exists,
that there's more than one possible route from
the womb to the coffin.*
* These words are not by MacDiarmid. I foisted them on him as a way of getting a piece of my own verse in print. MacDiarmid was still alive then but I knew he would never deny they were his, as he admitted having published so much that he could not remember it all, including lines he had taken from others.
Of Bill Skinner: A Small Thistle*
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE by the United States’ representatives in 1781 put the American episcopal church into great difficulty. It had no bishops, yet believed that bishops were essential to the making of new priests. Hitherto English bishops had consecrated American priests, but now the two countries were at war. The Church of England was headed by King George, who thought the U.S.A. an illegal organization. It seemed that the American episcopal priesthood might dwindle through senility into extinction, or turn itself into a wholly new kind of protestant sect. However, a third way was found. Although England’s government had absorbed the Scottish one seventy-five years earlier, Scotland’s legal system and churches had stayed independent and intact. A leading light in the tiny Scottish Episcopal Church was the
Rev. James Skinner, a poet whose Reel of Tullochgorum and The Ewie wi’ the Crookit Horn are still found in anthologies. His son, William Skinner, was a man of liberal sentiments, and Bishop of Aberdeen, and would soon be episcopal Primate of Scotland. So in 1784 William Skinner and two other Scottish bishops laid their right hands on the head of Dr. Seabury, a Connecticut Yankee, thus turning him into a bishop too. The blessing which Jesus once bestowed on Saint Peter could now be carried across the Atlantic in a contagious form.
On Monday morning the 24th May 1973 Bill Skinner, a last descendant of the episcopal Skinners, died of heart failure in Gartnavel General Hospital, Glasgow, at the age of sixty-nine. The family fortune had trickled very thin by the time it reached Bill. His father, a robust but feckless man, had been educated at Heidelberg University and then lumberjacked and bummed his way across America before ending his days in the Town Clerk’s office of Glasgow Corporation. When Bill left school he entered the shipyards as a maker-off, chalking points on steel plates where the rivet holes were to be cut. Retiring with heart-disease in the 1940s he worked thereafter as a part-time laboratory assistant in a private college which crammed people for the University entrance exams. When that closed in the mid sixties he lived frugally on his National Insurance pension. He never married, spending most of his life with his widowed mother at their home in Otago Street, in what was surely the last gas-lit tenement flat in Glasgow. He had no children. His only surviving relative had been a distant cousin in America.
These are the bare statistical bones of Skinner’s life, and one could be excused for thinking them bleak. The living reality was wonderfully different. Bill filled his life with such various imaginative activities – political, artistic, scientific, alchemical – that he became a source of delight and satisfaction to an unusually wide circle of friends. He was a member of the Andersonian Society, the Connolly Association, the CND, an American scientific correspondence society, and the Scottish-USSR Friendship Society.
His Otago Street home had a small laboratory where he did research into Particle Compression and the Origins of Life, printing (at his own expense) a small pamphlet setting out his views on these subjects. Anyone who cared to make an appointment would be shown over the small museum he had constructed in his mother’s front parlour, with its fossils, pressed plants, the headphones powered by body electricity, the transparent seagull’s skull and his exhibition of paintings. On average he produced two paintings a year: clear-edged, mysteriously coloured little symbolic works with names like Scotia Aspires, Tyro Wizard Town and Death of Death. I once heard him grow highly indignant with a critic who called him a Primitive. He thought this was a slur on his meticulous technique. Even in his last years, when badly crippled with arthritis, he produced, with the help of friends, two editions of the magazine Anvil Sparks, in which he wrote science, art and political notes, advertised the exhibitions of friends, and serialized the career of Henbane Dwining, the alchemist in Scott’s novel The Fair Maid of Perth, a character with whom he felt great sympathy.
Before illness confined him to the house he was an alert, quick, small boyish man with nutcracker nose and chin, and a mop of pale nicotine-coloured hair. Apparently it had once been bright red. When this faded he tried reviving the colour with a concoction of his own, but without much success. His pubs were the State Bar, the Blythswood Bar and the Pewter Pot before they were modernised. His favourite drinks were vodka with lime and High-Ho, another invention of his which he distilled from pharmaceutical alcohol. It was only brought out at Hogmanay, and a small glass of it diluted by three parts of water to one and flung in the fire could still produce dangerous explosions. He was cheerful, utterly independent, had many friends of both sexes and all ages, and not one enemy. He succeeded in life.
Some time in 1940, when working in the yards, he became a founder of a political party which drew its members mainly from the Anarchist, Trotskyite and Nationalist blocs. At the end of his life he was its only member, and he advanced its principles by fixing (with immense caution) small stickers to trees and lamp-posts in quiet streets near his home. The slogan on these stickers should be his epitaph:
SCOTTISH
SOCIALIST
REPUBLIC
NEUTRALITY
Beside these words is a small thistle.
* Most of this was in an obituary I wrote for a 1973 Glasgow West End News, then it became an entry in the 1984 Glasgow Diary published by Polygon Books, Edinburgh, edited by Donald Goodbrand Saunders, and was finally enlarged for publication in Lean Tales, 1985, published by Jonathan Cape, London: a collection of short stories by Agnes Owens, James Kelman and me, who made three of mine factual, like this.
Catalogue Introduction*
ONLY UNLUCKY PAINTERS have more than a few finished pictures in their studio at one time, so for a big show most of us borrow back work from patrons. Andrew Sykes, the Strathclyde Professor of Sociology, has bought from me steadily for fifteen years. When visiting him Stephen Ellson, curator of the Collins Exhibition Hall, saw my paintings and suggested this show. Mr. Ellson and I felt that the best order was chronological, to show the growth of my talent. I am therefore showing pictures from seconday school days and art school days, some of them unsuccessful like The Fall of the Star Wormwood, which tackled a problem too big for my talent, or unfinished, like my biggest canvas The North Glasgow Skyline, which I may live to finish.
I was born in Glasgow, late December 1943. Like other artists, picture-making obsessed me so a normal education was unable to stop it. Miss Jean Irwin’s Saturday painting class for children in Glasgow Art Galleries greatly encouraged me. The muddled style of the early work is caused by trying to blend the colour and figurative grandeur of Blake with the clean elegance of Beardsley, the social paradises and Hells of Bosch and the realism (not expressionism) of Munch. The results of that effort are raw and harsh, interesting but ugly. I was also influenced by Gulley Jimson, to me, the greatest of modern English painters.
* Catalogue published 28 March 1974 by Strathclyde University.
Of Gable-End Murals 1975*
DEAR CHARLOTTE RIORDAN, most of your questions about the 1970s tenement gables mural scheme do not apply to me. Like other artists commissioned for a design I drew one up, and perhaps it was too ambitious. It was a scheme for the four adjacent gables along the profile of Garnethill. From the western pavement of St George’s Road three tenement and a two storey house gable are visible above the embankment sloping down to the trench containing the motorway to the Kingston Bridge. Designs for these gables, a panorama of them on the hillside, plan of the area, typed essay explaining the idea were mounted on card and, as required, delivered to the Third Eye Centre. Tom McGrath was then boss, and may have been partly responsible for the scheme. I was paid for my plans but not employed to carry them out. Several months later, realising they would not be used, I asked for them back and was told nobody knew what had become of them. I assume they were abandoned at the back of some cupboard and have long been destroyed. I have a dyeline print of the whole panorama – nothing else – but can give you a rough précis of my general idea.
Big mural paintings on outside walls in working class districts seem to have originated in North America as a way of making dull, unbeautifully designed brick and concrete buildings look cheerful and interesting. But Glasgow tenements, even in poor districts, were of well-built stone and had well-designed architectural completeness – even the street plans had usually been designed on a dignified grid pattern. Industrial depression between the wars had turned many into overcrowded slums without decent plumbing. These tenements were mainly thought ugly by visitors from England who thought brick terraces the only civilised urban architecture, so among Glasgow town planners and councillors after the Second World War there was a general opinion that all old Glasgow tenements should be demolished and the town centre completely rebuilt with sweeping motorways, multi-storey tenements and office blocks. A plan for this was commissioned from an architect called Bruce in the
fifties. A model of it exhibited in the Kelvin Hall showed a future Glasgow where the Civic Chambers, the Cathedral, Kelvingrove Art Galleries and University were all that remained from the past. The amount of demolition proposed was impractical, but some of the scheme was carried through and explains why Glasgow acquired many more miles of motorway round the centre than London, why multi-storey schemes were built that have since been demolished, why so many Glasgow tenements had blank gables because they had been half or a quarter demolished. So why not brighten them with murals by professional artists, big and bright enough to put graffiti artists to shame?
I thought that designs for a big new mural in a conspicuous public site where people lived should be submitted to them for approval. Better still, artists should first meet them, propose several designs, and after discussion, chose one a majority of residents preferred. This was not done because democracy gives officials more trouble than they like. A committee of folk from outside a district find it easier choosing a mural for it by an artist who also lives elsewhere. And since I thought Glasgow tenements better architecture than the industrial housing areas of North America, I felt some sorts of mural would demean them almost as much as a gigantic commercial advertisement. I do not know if John Byrne’s gable end near Duke Street survives – I hope so – it filled the space amusingly with a Wally Dug three storeys high – but it demeaned the scale of the tenement. Certainly it was better than nothing, and cheaper than covering a concrete skim-coat with new stonework and windows that harmonised with the tenements front and back.
I thought my design for the four gables between the western ends of Carnarvon and Renfrew Street could easily be approved by those living behind them, as their gables overhung a steep hillside abandoned to shrubbery, ending in the gulley containing the new motorway. They would only be seen from the other side of St George’s Road. The huge trees I wished to paint on these gables, would appear to grow from the bushes at the foot of them, trees with spreading branches. Behind these I would have trompe l’oeil painting of the original gables, which have been demolished when the west end of Garnethill was cut back to let the motorway through. I hope that answers your questions.Yours truly, Alasdair Gray.
Of Me and Others Page 11