Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  “Lucy,” says Geikie, “we want to eat.”

  “Not yet, Geikie!” says Lucy firmly, “Because I have something important to say. Fin de siecle! End of age, start of other and what rough beast, June Tain, is shambling toward Bethlehem to be born? I’ll tell you at the end of my next paragraph. I talk in paragraphs. Please remember all I say because tomorrow I won’t recall a word.

  “Now a lot of idiots think the British spy system sorry BRITISH INTELLIGENCE system is full of Russian double-agents. Nonsense. We’ve had a lot of these but our relationship with the Yanks ensures that it’s the CIA who know most of our secrets and we have learned quite a few of theirs. Do you remember Scottish Referendum, June Tain? When it looked like London might let us off the hook, haha? Well, a friend of mine – a fine fellow and a brave soldier – showed me the CIA plans for Scotland if it won some independence for itself, and the astonishing thing was – “

  Mr Geikie, who has become restless, mutters, “Better not tell us these things Lucy.”

  “Pipe down Geikie you are not in the same LEAGUE as your charming assistant and me, she is a Hell’s Angel and I am a DRAGON-FLY, a bright spark spawned by the burning breath of the Beast of the Bottomless Pit. A fine statesman, Pitt. Do you know, June Tain, that the Yanks were going to be quite kind to independent Scotland? A lot kinder than to Guatemala, Nicaragua etcetera. They were NOT afraid of us becoming a socialist republic because they felt we’d be even easier to manipulate than England – fewer chiefs to bribe was how my friend put it – and no trouble at all compared with Ireland, especially the north bit. And what I want to tell you is this.”

  Lucy leans across the table and tells June in a hissing whisper, “The CIA scenario for an independent Scotland has not been scrapped and you are filling me with mysterious insights.”

  He stands and speaks in a solemn and quiet voice which grows steadily louder.

  “I am a Douglas on my mother’s side, a descendant of that Black Douglas who was Stabbed to The Death by The Hand of A King. And if you tell me it was some other Douglas who was stabbed to death by Jamie the First or Second or Third or Fourth or Fifth I DON’T CARE! I STILL FEEL PROPHETIC! I PROPHESY THAT JUNE TAIN – “

  He points a finger at June and says more intimately, “I prophesy that you, June Tain,” then notices his friends are beckoning him and more people are entering the restaurant. He murmurs, “Forgive me – I’m boring you,” and returns to his friends.

  That was all I could imagine of June’s story. I thought of extending it by having her use Senga and Donalda to entangle and corrupt important legislators, thus provoking a feminist socialist revolution. I could not believe in it. Yet from June visiting the leatherwear shop to Lucifer’s speech was less than a quarter of what I had been paid to write. If I could not expand that by imaginative growth I must expand it by mere additions. June’s story had a pornographic content. Such fancies come easily to me. Could I add more of them? I wrote the dialogue between the white American women which I later used in “Culture Capitalism”, but tired of it. Such fancies are repetitive, and I had already written a novel using them. I decided to enlarge the book with anything interesting I could put on paper, however irrelevant: - essays, bits of autobiography, perhaps a play or two. More than a decade ago most of what I earned had been payment for television and radio plays. I had long wanted to give them new life in a book. In the early seventies a one act play called Dialogue had been broadcast by Scottish BBC radio, networked by Granada television, taken on tour by the short-lived Scottish Stage Company. I prosed it into the present tense, called it A Free Man with a Pipe, found it easy to think the Man is June’s unsatisfactory ex-husband, that he is trying to forget her by half-heartedly seducing someone else. But her voice on the telephone finally demolishes him.

  This suggested a form of book I had not written before. After the chapter showing Senga and Donalda seducing June in the late 1980s (the fashions in the streets give the date) the book would flash back to them in earlier years, each chapter showing one of my three women involved with men who failed them in very different but commonplace ways. As I dug for more material among past dramas I began hoping to show a greater than usual variety of those who make our Britain. I had tried that in my first and longest book, but had lacked the knowledge to build (as Dickens built in Little Dorrit) leaders of finance, government, law, and fashion into a continuous plot involving the factories, slums and slum landlords, the jailors and the jailed. I had patched over my ignorance with abbreviations and metaphors. But a book of episodes showing the lives of three women converging over twenty-five years might describe, without fantasy, shifts and dependencies between many believable people. Once again my book would contain no real leaders of government, finance, law, fashion etcetera, but my setting was Scotland, so how could it? Like most Scots and many English I assumed most such leaders work in London and are no use to us. I should have remembered that much of Scotland is useful to them.

  The chapters called The Proposal, The Man Who Knew About Electricity, In the Boiler Room and A Free Man With a Pipe stick so close to original plays that they contain nearly every word of the original dialogue. Mr Lang and Ms Tain uses half a play, Quiet People the start of one. If any readers of Quiet People feel worried for the Liddels I can show them typed proof that the Liddels and their lodgers were good for each other, separating with friendship on both sides, though suddenly.

  But Harry was a new, unexpected idea. In the earliest version of the first chapter she did not even appear in a photograph. She was invented for Class Party because a quartette allowed more permutations than a trio, but she said little because I had no idea where she came from or what job she did when not playing perverse games with Senga. I knew she was a rarer social type than the other women, it helped the plot for her to be rich, i84t was a useful economy to think a horrid upbringing had made it hard for her to talk. For a while I never bothered imagining a past for her, but had a rough idea she might be the administrator of a large hospital. One day I was talking to a friend about what makes rich people different from you and me, especially the rich whose wealth is a habit of mind because it is a settled inheritance. My friend had met some of them in a boarding school she had attended, also in an art gallery where she occasionally worked. I too had met some and been fascinated by the occasional remark which showed they were foreign to me. I had walked in a big private garden with an owner who had devoted it wholly to trees and shrubs because plots of flowers gave his gardener too much work. I asked if he grew vegetables. He said, “I did once. It was too much trouble. You can get them in a shop for a few shillings.”

  I had known a young woman who disliked all the people her parents liked, saying she preferred the company of “ordinary people”. She sulked when expected to make a cup of Nescafé for herself, said she could not possibly do that, proved it by floating a spoonful of the powder in a mug of lukewarm water. These people were individuals, not types, but Scott Fitzgerald started his story The Rich Boy with, “Describe an individual and you may end with a type; describe a type and you are likely to end with – nothing.” I remarked to my friend that perhaps the very rich, after leaving school, found it hard to take others seriously after boarding school, because at last they could easily replace or escape from whoever did not perfectly fit them. This might explain the astonishingly unaffectionate treatment some of them gave their young. As I brooded on this I suddenly imagined Harry’s mother saying at her birth, “Oh God a fucking little gel,” and began conceiving my distant cousin of a queen. My direct experience of her class was slight, though its speech rhythms had resounded through all the homes where I lived from babyhood. Lord Reith was a Glasgow minister’s son but the BBC system he created was for decades dominated by the dialect of English private boarding schools. I had also met the English rich in the pages of Wilde, Firbank, Hemingway’s Fiesta, and Evelyn Waugh.

  I did not expect to write much about Harry at first. I planned to shift her in one chapter from her nasty S
cottish nanny and chilling mother to a boarding school, thence to the Warburg or Courtauld Institute, thence to being an arts administrator in Scotland. But the boarding school acquired a distinct geography where I invented active bodies to support interesting details. “Amanda’s kid” and “new money” had been phrases I invented or borrowed to show what a snob Harry’s mother was. In the shrubbery the two phrases became Hjordis with The Fortress, Linda with the speech and character she is evicted from. I grew so attached to Harry that I made her an artist and took three chapters to move her north. The chronology of the book (shown below) turns out neatly, even so, apart from Quiet People. The age of Donalda’s child and some other details required the date to be 1971, so it was placed out of sequence to avoid putting two Donalda stories together.

  CHAPTERS YEARS HEROINES

  One For The Album 1989 June, Senga, Donalda

  A Distant Cousin of a Queen 1963 Harry

  The Proposal 1965 Senga

  The Man Who Knew About Electricity 1967 Donalda

  Mr Lang and Ms Tain 1973 June

  In the Boiler Room 1977 Senga

  Quiet People 1971 Donalda

  The Bum Garden 1963–1989 Harry

  A Free Man With a Pipe 1989 June (off stage)

  Culture Capitalism 1989 Harry, Senga

  Dad’s Story 1989 Donalda, Harry

  Class Party 1989 June, Donalda, Senga, Harry

  New June 1989 June, Donalda, Senga, Harry

  The last chapter ended sooner than I planned. When June returned to the shop where the novel began I saw Mr Geikie and Lucifer were irrelevant. June was now a new woman, and to describe how she used her newness would limit it. There was a hint that after Senga and Donalda had worked to liberate her, June (the professional person) and Harry (the inherited wealth person) would cut themselves off from the poorer folk and have fun together. It is an unfair end to this tale but it is how, in Great Britain, things are normally arranged.

  * Headed Critic-Fuel – An Epilogue ended the novel, issued by Jonathan Cape, London 1990. This epilogue uniquely gives a new fictional conclusion.

  Of Pierre Lavalle*

  ARTHUR NOEL LAVALLE, painter and art publicist, was born in Sunbury-on-Thames in 1918. His father was a Belgian mechanic, a refugee from that German invasion which began the First World War. His mother was district nurse from the Scottish part of Berwick-on-Tweed. As a child he stayed there with his granny and says he remembers the rigours of the Presbyterian Sabbaths.

  In 1929 industrial depression put Arthur Lavalle’s father, and many other mechanics, out of work. The family moved to Valenciennes, an industrial district of France, where the father’s accent did not hinder him in finding employment. Between his 11th and 21st year young Lavalle had French schooling and began to paint landscapes in the English style – ‘rotten paintings’ he says of them now. He joined a political group which thought all organizations which control by force (governments, armies, police etc.) should be replaced by many small, locally elected communes. The Valenciennes anarchists thought art was anything people did or made: that if a modern teaspoon was dug up 500 years later, archaeologists and art critics would, quite rightly, admire its form, symmetry and the cunning that had made it. An acquaintance who thought French bicycle races a great art form collected tyres from machines of well-known racers and hung them on his walls. Such ideas did not help an artist who wanted to make a flat surface beautiful by stroking it with paint, but they stimulated thought. A Jewish friend, after looking at a young Lavalle’s early landscapes, asked him why he never used his imagination? The question astonished him, but he found it helpful.

  In 1938, a British anarchist who saw the likelihood of a Nazified Europe, he shifted to London, joining the British army in 1939. It may have been inconsistent for an anarchist to join an army but many Christians who thought it wrong to kill did so too. His knowledge of French got him work with the Defence Ministry. After the war he continued as a civil servant with the Ministry of Information, then the Charities Commission. His life now easily divided into three periods: 11 years of English childhood, 9 of French education, 8 of British military and civil service. The third period would have been bleak without friends and associates. He married a professional violinist. He knew Lucian Freud, Dylan Thomas, Tambimuttu (the editor of Poetry London), and the BBC intellectuals who met in the Wheatsheaf Pub. These had strong Glasgow connections, for a lot of British broadcasting was done from Glasgow in the war years. He knew Guy Aldred, editor of The Word. He was friendly with an anarchist group containing Emma Goldman, Herbert Read (with whom he quarrelled), Ethel Mannin, novelist who nicknamed him Pierre. He adopted it. In France his baptismal name of Arthur had asserted his foreignness. In Britain he, the son of exiles, made his foreignness a garment, accepted the nickname Pierre and wore a beret.

  In 1947 he was nearing 30 and had begun to find London oppressive. His marriage had ended. He was tired of pen-pushing and wanted to make a fresh start as a full-time painter, breaking completely with his past. He came to Glasgow. I quote him: “Glasgow at that time was the 2nd city of Britain. I had heard so much about it, the Gorbals, the Red Clydeside, Louis MacNeice. It was, and still is, a very interesting city. I wasn’t going to bury myself. Things that used to happen in Glasgow were important.” Once again Clydeside was building most of the Empire’s warships, so there was a revival of the industrial power, political confidence, and artistic vigour which the end of the 1914-18 war had depressed. With the bombing of London, Glasgow no longer seemed a grubby place. The painter J D Fergusson and his wife Margaret Morris returned here from France: the painters Josef Herman and Jankel Adler from occupied Europe. They stimulated discussion groups, art shows and performances in studios and meeting places near Sauchiehall Street. Colquhon, McBride and Joan Eardley were students at the Art School. A new theatre was begun called the Unity because the government was trying to create national unity with socialist legislation, some of which encouraged fine arts in some places they had never reached before. The Glasgow Unity gave a professional start to the careers of Duncan Macrae, Roddy Mcmillan and other fine actors, the director Joan Littlewood, the painters Tom MacDonald and Bet Low. Its biggest success, The Gorbals Story, was taken to London, filmed, and inspired a Sadlers Wells Ballet. Pierre’s view of Glasgow as a culture capital where art and socialism were uniting to abolish the slums was not eccentric in 1947. He was then renting a studio at the top of a Sauchiehall Street tenement facing the Art School.

  After that something happened which can be illustrated by an anecdote. When the Scottish Arts Council was formed after the war it had no permanent office and was composed about six people, James Bridie and Naomi Richardson among them. It met alternately in a room in Glasgow and a room in Edinburgh. Ten years later it had a snug Edinburgh office with permanent receptionist, secretaries, departments chiefs, and Mrs Kemp, the director. An artist I knew (Alan Fletcher) met her at the opening of an exhibition. In a charmingly friendly way, “From Glasgow are you?” she asked. “How do you manage there? Whenever I visit Glasgow I feel in Omsk or Tomsk or some such place.”

  London domination of and indifference to the rest of Britain had returned. What most Londoners now knew of Glasgow culture was a half-forgotten play set in the Gorbals. That an Edinburgh official took the same ignorant view was natural, but many Glaswegians also adopted it – even artists. At Glasgow Art School between 1952 and 57, I and other students wanted Glasgow to produce original Scottish work, but no teacher told us, nothing we read indicated, that Glasgow had done that many times, even in the dismal 30s. I saw retrospective shows of work by Cowie, Fergusson and Pringle in Kelvingrove Museum, was excited by such good painting, yet felt they could not be truly great because the retrospective was not in the Tate Gallery. Too many Glasgow intellectuals disparaged each other and despised themselves. How could we who did not oppose the widespread opinion of how unimportant we were? Some solved that problem by going to London or America. Pierre Lavalle was the only one I met who und
erstood that for all but a lucky few it is as hard to be a good artist anywhere else as it is in Glasgow, and that fine art was worth making, whoever ignored it.

  But Pierre refused to be ignored. Small, urgent, full of learning and ideas about the painting he did, very keen to see other people’s work and discuss their own ideas. Pierre attended the few cafes, pubs and studios near Sauchiehall Street where some hopeful art students and striving artists still sometimes met. We found him likeable, stimulating and annoying. In weak moments, feeling exiled from our community by our talents, yet each hugging a talent protectively like a secret vice, we wanted only to moan to a fellow sufferer. Pierre thought exile too commonplace to mention. He wanted to discuss OUR WORK.