Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  In the early seventies, by Arts Council subsidy and local government donation, new arts centres with exhibition galleries and salaried administrators came to most of the Scottish cities. The administrators are usually strangers to the cities where they work and are often English, because there are more highly qualified English than Scots looking for work in modern Britain. The administrators honestly wish to show the best in modern art, including local Scottish art, but how do they know what that is? By repute, and by experience. If artists exhibit once or twice a year with other artists, and have a single show of their own from time to time, administrators get to know them almost unconsciously, through an accumulation of tiny repetitions of names in conversations, invitation-cards and posters. They can also see the artists’ product in galleries, in their absence, in a context of acceptance and appreciation, and can decide to exhibit it without meeting and judging a peculiar human being. Administrators, therefore, hardly2 ever meet the Scottish hermit painter, and only do so with discomfort on both sides. And nobody can help by approaching an administrator, pointing to a distant figure and saying, “See him! Show him! He’s great!” Those who do are the artist’s friend, and prejudiced.

  So in 1985 Alasdair is one of over 350,000 Scots whose work is not wanted and whose artistic activity embarrasses well qualified, highly salaried officials who administer arts centres and galleries.

  His wife has stopped him being a tragic soul by becoming the family’s breadwinner, so he is not on the dole, and continually works hard at what he does best. He often feels lonely and useless, but we all have our troubles. Hardworking, salaried arts administrators and teachers have quite different troubles, and can dismiss him with a touch of envy. He creates what they are paid to promote. His work accumulates. I would like to think that one day more than a few people will see and love it.

  * This essay was first printed in a 1973 Scottish International magazine and also was one of the three biographical sketches in the Lean Tales anthology beside work by Agnes Owens and James Kelman, published by Jonathan Cape in 1985.

  1. Disposable used to mean nothing but easily positioned. The rapid manufacture and marketing of the sixties and seventies brought it to mean also easily replaced and, in addition, rejected after use. Then military logicians started using it to denote the part of a fighting force or population whose death will prevent victory and perhaps assist it. Disposable thus came to mean dispensable and, in the eyes of authority, useless and unnecessary.

  2. When this article was written and Mrs. Thatcher’s government had only started to privatise Britain in the big way continued ever since. The state of art in Scotland, for better or worse, is different in 2014.

  Of R. D. Laing

  AFTER THE DIVIDED SELF was published in 1960 and The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise in 1967 Ronald Laing’s thoughts about the nature of madness appealed to many educated minds, including mine. In 1985 he came to Glasgow to publicise his biography The Making of a Psychologist and Peter Kravitz, editor of The Edinburgh Review, arranged for him to meet James Kelman, Tom Leonard and me in a Byres Road pub after a talk he was giving in Gartnavel Royal Hospital, where he had first worked as a psychologist. We attended the talk. I was embarrassed at first by his slow, careful speech with long pauses between sentences, and (worse still) between words within a sentence. These disconcerting pauses did not distract from an important argument.

  He announced that he would amuse us by reading from a manual published by the pharmaceutical industry, for the guidance of medical practitioners in the U.S.A. and Britain. It advised which drugs should be used to treat mental illness, and had a lot to say about those whose behaviour has been described under many names since the end of the 19th century, but is now widely known as schizophrenia. It said schizophrenics were all manipulative, sometimes aggressively so, but also sometimes managed others by acting passive to the point of extreme shyness. They could be highly sexed and erotically demanding, but also totally frigid, or cunning enough to appear completely normal. As Laing read from the manual it became clear that doctors could use it to find almost any patient’s behaviour clinically suspect and use it as an excuse for drugging them. He ended by saying, “Why are we using this fucking thing?” and flung it on the floor.*

  As we left he was talking to former colleagues by the doorway, so on the way past I mentioned my name, saying I hoped to see him later. He asked for the name again, then embraced me and kissed me long and hard on the lips. I knew this was a kind of test so did not struggle, and left smartly when released.

  On meeting him later in the pub there was nothing in his speech which, earlier, had made me think him drunk. At that time I had not seen a dentist for many years. He said, “I see you’ve lost even more teeth than me,” and smiled showing a set of strong white upper dentures with one obvious gap. I asked how that had happened. He said, “I was punched in the mouth by a Buddhist monk.” I asked why. He said, “I called him a stupid fucking yellow cowardly bastard.” He said also he was glad I had written Lanark because it accurately described the link between asthma and guilty feelings about masturbation. He said he had wanted to write about that, but could not, and now need not because I had done it.

  In later years I met him in the home of John Duthie, with whom he stayed when visiting Glasgow, where his seperated first wife and children lived. He told me that his friend Sean Connery was keen to play the part of King Pentheus in The Bachae of Euripedes and had asked him to consider writing the script, a job he felt I was more equipped to do. He dictated a short letter to the actor in a familiar, easy style offering my services, which he thought had the right tone. I wrote, signed and posted it with no great expectations of a reply so was not disappointed.

  He died in 1989, and two years ago his daughter asked me to say a few words and unveil a plaque commemorating him over the close of the tenement where he was born and had grown up. The tenement was like those in Riddrie, the housing scheme where we all thought ourselves middle class though Marx would have called petit bourgeoisie. Laing’s dad had worked in a civil engineering firm. The gathering was a small one with no reporters from radio, television and the local press. I praised Laing as a psychologist with the patience to listen carefully to his patients, even some who did not pay him big money. I knew he was not a good family man – a pity, but perhaps slightly damaged folk can most intelligently sympathize with others of that sort. I gathered that more doctors were finding drugs the most convenient treatment of mental problems. Laing, of course, would have hated that, I thought with good reason.

  I told his daughter that an article in an English paper had implied that her father had grown up in a tough Glasgow slum, and supposed this was because in London the words Glasgow tenement suggested thugs fighting with razors. She smiled and said, “Dad liked to dramatize himself.”

  * 2014 Postscript. In the most recent addition of the pharmaceutical handbook Ronnie denounced, grief for the death of a loved one that persists for more than a fortnight is defined as a mental illness of a sort to be treated with named drugs.

  Of Scottie Wilson*

  IN LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY Glasgow, Louis Freeman, the son of Lithuanian Jews, learnt to talk with a Scottish voice. His first forty years of life were harsh but richly varied. He was a street-trader in Glasgow and London between soldiering in Africa, lndia and the Flanders trenches. Perhaps he deserted from the Black-and-Tans in Ireland but certainly, calling himself Robert Wilson, he got to Canada, where he was nicknamed Scottie. One day in the midst of middle-age he sat at the back of his junkshop in Toronto, picked up an old fountain pen collected for the gold in the nib, started doodling with it and didn’t want to stop. Pictures began flowing from him. This is explicable. Imagine a man with a strong inbred shaping skill, an intuitive sculptor who has never touched the tools of his craft and has found no joy in life before, at the age of forty, he starts accidentally whittling a stick.

  Wilson was an instinctive designer, which is why his later work tra
nslated so well into textile, ceramic and Unicef greeting cards. Using pen and crayon like an embroiderer, each stroke a coloured stitch, for over forty years he made spooky, colourful, mainly symmetrical designs blending shapes of bird, fish, tree, house and his own knubbly face. He made so many that fourteen years after his death dealers still have stores of them, and have combined with the publishers of George Melly’s book to exhibit and promote them.

  It’s All Writ Out For You contains forty-eight colour plates showing the variety and growth of Wilson’s talent: the scratchy earlier work which shows its origin in the automatic doodle, the densely organized and ominous compositions of his middle period, and the garden-like later tapestries which are as beautiful as fine Persian carpets, and for the same reasons. The colour reproduction is good, except of the larger works, which are given a shrunken postcard look by the broad white surrounding margins. Only the jacket reproduces detail on a scale showing the texture of a surface.

  George MeIIy’s text was written at the wish of Victor Musgrave, Wilson’s main friend and dealer who died before he could write it himself. Inevitably, given Wilson’s history, the result is a commentary on hearsay, but the commentary shows how hard it is for a cultured Englishman to believe that someone of a different culture is equally intelligent. In his autobiographies Mr Melly writes wise and entertaining prose; he is a good, popular jazz singer so no snob; he has liked and promoted Wilson’s art for nearly forty years, yet discusses him like a liberal Victorian ethnographer discussing a Maori. Wilson spoke highly of Blake, having heard his poems on the radio and having been shown his pictures by Swiss collectors. Says Melly, ‘The lovers of primitive painting seem unable to resist this sort of thing. It’s a dangerous activity, exactly threatening the self-taught spontaneity which...’ etc. In other words, these foreign agitators could upset the frail culture of our natives by giving them new ideas.

  Melly knows Wilson was a conscious comic who also told tall tales, but doubts if he knew exactly where reality stopped and fiction began, and to many in the professional classes the British working class is indeed an aboriginal tribe, more so if it is also Scottish. And were the many small strokes Wilson put into his work a substitute for masturbation? Was he schizophrenic? Did painting, on the contrary, stop him going insane? The book asks these impertinent, clinical questions (which could be asked of Francis Bacon or any original artist) and of course cannot answer them. They are phrases to disguise bafflement.

  The bafflement is understandable. Like Ulysses, and Huckleberry Finn, and other globetrotters who had to live by their wits among strangers, Wilson used false names and gave enquirers versions of his past which would best please them, becoming Jewish among Jews, a Scot amongst the British. The Glasgow Third Eye Centre exhibition displays a photograph of him promoting his work in Canada. His crisp waistcoat, collar and tie and impressive owl-like glasses make him look like the present head of a northern Arts Council. Europeans preferred the working-class eccentric and it was easy to oblige them. The Thames and Hudson press handout says, ‘he remained steadfastly outside the modish art worId’, which only means that he dressed like the street-trader he had been, and therefore looked like an ordinary part of the London where he lodged and worked. He disliked selling his pictures, yet (according to Musgrave) sold them cheaply, preferably in bulk. And he worked hard. But the modish art world was his meat and drink, it let him live by the creations of his vision, so he clung to it, although (says Roger Cardinal) ‘he always knew that his attendance at cocktail parties in the galleries was by way of decoration’. Cardinal means that the presence of folk who bought and sold art were essential to gallery shows – not the artist Wilson. Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, any English artist educated at an expensive boarding school was essential but Scottie Wilson was decoration. What a queer country Britain is! No wonder Wilson half-hated the art-dealing folk he needed to earn a living by sale of his work.

  The travelling exhibition which has started at the Glasgow Third Eye Centre shows the widest range of Wilson’s pictures. These are not for sale. The Mayor Gallery, Cork Street, exhibits work exclusively from the 1950s and is already half sold out. The Gillian Jason Gallery shows work from the 1960s too. The exhibition in the Arthouse, Lambeth, though small, is the most attractively grouped and mounted. The overall prices seem right for the works of one who is minor, but a definite, and definitely enjoyable master.

  * A Times Literary Supplement review, 14.03.1986, of It’s All Writ Out for You, the art of Scottie Wilson chosen and introduced by George Melly.

  Five Glasgow Artists Show*

  ORGANIZER TELLS EVERYTHING. Astonishing news! Last year the British publicity machines broadcast a new and astonishing fact: four recent graduates of Glasgow Art School are making enough money from the sale of their paintings to live by painting alone. Their work was admired by a Glasgow Art School director with the enthusiasm, knowledge and contacts to promote it in New York and therefore also in London, and thus in Scotland too.

  So painting in Glasgow is now news: news flowing through catalogues, television documentaries, Edinburgh literary magazines, English quality papers and the Glasgow Herald. Some local history is needed to explain why this news induces a mixture of anger, envy and hope in other Glasgow artists: especially in us old ones who grew up in the Dark Age between the emigration of Rennie Mackintosh in 1914 and the coming of the Glasgow Pups seventy years later.

  WHAT JACK SAID

  Recently Jack Maclean, our urban Voltaire, a Glasgow art teacher with a journalist’s gift of the gab, said the arts in Glasgow reminded him of a diamante brooch on a boiler suit. He knew, of course, he was saying what most people in Glasgow, Edinburgh and England take for granted. Once they thought differently.

  THE GOLDEN AGE

  Around 1900 Glasgow had schools of painting and design with international reputations. Like their contemporaries, the French impressionists, the artists of the Scottish middle-west were mostly from prosperous families, yet maintained themselves by their talent. Their products were imported and acclaimed by galleries in Vienna, Munich and London, yet they were respected by an informed Glasgow public before, not after they got famous abroad. Dying Whistler by-passed all the English art galleries and willed his unsold work to the Hunterian Museum because of Glasgow’s reputation as a cultural capital.

  SIXTY YEARS HARD

  Yet after the First World War all young Scots who showed artistic talent were told by their teachers, ‘Of course, you’ll never make a living by your art in Scotland’, and for over sixty years this was an almost absolute truth. Talented moderns like Colquhoun and McBride emigrated. The artists who remained became dominies or hermits. The dominies painted between teaching. Some of them, like Cowie, kept their talent bright and effective but produced a fraction of their potential, while the art of the rest became stale and dated, though they dominated the art schools and the official exhibitions. The hermits shrank into eccentric seclusion. Only one of them – Joan Eardley – had a small private income, so developed as she should have done. Most hermits were poor, like Joan’s friend Angus Neil, so their talents afflicted them like incurable diseases. In the late sixties a sort of artist appeared who was neither emigre, dominie or hermit, but supported his pictorial art by a share-time literary job. I say ‘his’ pictorial art because the only artists of this sort I know are John Byrne and me. But an informed Scottish public for modern Scottish art – or any kind of modern art – had almost vanished. Why?

  THE CATASTROPHE

  What had befallen Scottish art had befallen other industries. The industrial boom years before 1914 happened when the British Admiralty had most of its battleships built on Clydeside. The later managers of British capital decided they could save money by concentrating it in South Britain or by investing abroad, so Scottish investors lost confidence in their homeland as a place where good modern things could be originated.

  This explanation is insufficient. The recent good fortune of the so-called Glasgow Pups shows that th
e widespread neglect of local Scottish art this century was not made inevitable by John Knox or Economic Necessity. An informed, imaginative promotion of it by Glasgow dealers with international connections could have maintained confidence. Before 1914 Glasgow had several dealers of that calibre who promoted modern Scottish painting at home and overseas. Such dealers as Annan and Reid were still there in 1919. Why was their work for Scottish art not resumed?

  THE CURSE OF THE BURRELL

  Because they were too busy. Sir William Burrell, ship owner, had sold his merchant shipping fleet to the Australian Government, become a multi-millionaire, retired from business, and decided to give Glasgow the biggest private art collection in Europe. He had very little interest in modern art and none in contemporary Scottish art. Scotland’s best private dealers – the ones with international connections – made so much money helping Sir William to acquire foreign antiques that modern Scottish painting became one of their less profitable sidelines.

  Burrell was not the only Glasgow millionaire collector, but the other (Cargill) was equally uninterested in local products. When Burrell and Cargill died after World War Two the old Scottish dealing firms had lost contact with contemporary painting at home and abroad and dwindled to insignificance. Annan’s splendid gallery in Sauchiehall Street became a recruiting office. To get any attention at all Glasgow artists had to appear in self-help organisations like the Royal Glasgow Institute, the Arts Club and the Glasgow Group, which were unable to sustain a general public for themselves or start a controversy interesting enough to be important news. And this was hardly the organisations’ fault. A vital idea embodied in a work of art would not have been news to our local press and broadcasters. We had become provincial, by which I mean a people who expect news and initiatives to come from elsewhere.