Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  He had as much to moan about as anyone else. After some satisfying sales in the 40s and early 50s, he was gripped by the new cultural ice age. Glasgow’s commercial art galleries had dwindled from three to one, and the municipal galleries had a policy of showing no local contemporary work. He still sold some paintings through group exhibitions in Edinburgh, London, France and Canada, but this provided no livelihood. He had met Marguerite his second wife, who bore him a daughter, Cherie, in 1955. His only dependable income was from part-time art lecturing for Glasgow University extra-mural department: work for which he travelled from Dumfries to Oban. He was one of the artists who in 1959 hung an exhibition from the railings of the Botanic Gardens. He was in the group which conceived the new Charing Cross Gallery, established with Arts Council aid. This became The Compass Gallery under Cyril Gerber’s management. In 1963 and 64 Pierre became the only critic to steadily publicise Scottish painting.

  The last sentence needs explaining. At that time Cordelia Oliver and Martin Baillie reviewed art for The Glasgow Herald, and Robert Gage for The Scotsman. They often had too little space to give more than a quick opinion, they were commissioned too irregularly to offer a steady survey, and (worst of all) had no colour reproductions, seldom even a monochrome, to show the reader what they were talking about. The Scottish Field gave Pierre a monthly page to deal with an artist’s work while developing an argument or giving an illustrative parable. It had colour reproductions of paintings, and a photo of the artist. If a history of Glasgow art is ever written, the author will find Pierre’s Field articles the best single guide to the 60s. He wrote of Scottish painters from elsewhere, but the Field was based in Glasgow, so he surveyed it more completely.

  He wrote about the recently dead, such as J. D. Fergusson, the established such as Davie Donaldson, talented survivors such as Tom MacDonald and Bet Low, talents about to be recognised – Pat Douthwait was one – also others with a long, tough trail ahead of them: Bill Crozier, Douglas Abercrombie, Alasdair Taylor and Carol Gibbons. In 1963 he wished goodbye and good luck to Fred Pollock, a young painter leaving for London. After a quarter of a century when Pollock’s expressionism was unfashionable, it is at last being esteemed and bought in England.

  I first saw Pierre’s paintings in a Glasgow gallery in 1953. I remember low, bare hills painted in thin oils on the smooth side of hardboard panels. Each with an almost monochrome colouring, and haunted by surprising creatures, of an old Flemish demon sort. I did not like these but cannot forget them. I next saw his paintings 10 years later and liked them greatly. He had discovered a technique which suited his vision, a strong colourful one, and he had discovered it through his daughter. She was attending Peel Street Nursery School, in Partick, and her teacher had accepted Pierre’s offer to help with Christmas decorations. He decided to paint the nativity story in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry, on a long strip of paper to be fixed along the wall like a frieze. As this was for children it was easy for him to paint playfully, with the brightness and clarity he had always enjoyed in Matisse, Kadinsky and Paul Klee, but had never before thought to use for himself. ‘Magic Realist’ is a literary school, but is apt for the paintings of Pierre. They have the brightness and clarity of fairy tale illustration yet the subject matter is seldom fantastic and usually landscape. Working chiefly with enamels, he builds zones of sea or sky, field or city, using small triangles or lozenges of colour divided from each other by a vividness without optical confusion. But there is no point in describing what those who like painting should see for themselves. The best are subtle, beautiful harmonies. All are a pleasure to the eye.

  This exhibition in the Pearce Institute in Govan, is of work completed up to the middle 70s when Pierre stopped painting. He was suddenly exhausted and depressed by continual exile, by his artistic and spiritual generosity which too many people ignored or thought merely comic. His wife Marguerite never ignored it and is still his closest friend and helper, though their marriage ended while he was still painting.* It was Marguerite and Brian Petherbridge who arranged this exhibition.

  * An introduction to a catalogue of paintings shown in The Pearce Institute, Govan, South Glasgow, 1990.

  * Pierre Lavalle died on Tuesday 26th March 2002.

  Of Andrew Sykes*

  IN 1960 I WENT ON HOLIDAY TO Ireland with Andrew Sykes, a tough small stocky man with a thick thatch of white hair and a face like a boxer’s. Like myself he dressed comfortably rather than smartly. We had met when he was a mature student at Glasgow University and I a very callow one just out of Glasgow Art School. We were from a working class who benefited when two post-war governments (Labour and Tory) agreed that all who qualified for professional education might have them whether or not they or their parents could pay. Andrew, who had been a sergeant with the British army in India, eventually won a doctorate through a paper on trade unions in the building industry, getting his knowledge by the unacademic ploy of working as a navy. His army experience and a course in economics had also given him insights into the workings of our officer and financial class. He took malicious glee in gossiping to me about the insider trading by which this minority manipulate the rest. My notion of Britain had been formed at the end of the Second World War when our government announced the coming of a fairer society and the creation of social welfare for all. I had thought Britain was now mainly managed by folk who had mastered difficult processes through training and experience. Andrew explained that, as often today as in the past, most British civil service and business chiefs had stepped into senior positions because they had been to three or four expensive schools and a couple of universities in the east midlands: institutions where exams mattered less than their parent’s wealth and friends they made. He persuaded me that Britain was not (as most of our politicians and publicity networks say) a democracy, but an electoral aristocracy.

  I thought Andrew disliked this unfair system since he was entering a profession through a socialist act of parliament. On our Irish holiday (we were guests of friends Greta and David Hodgins at Nenagh in Tipperary) I was surprised to find he hated any group who wanted to change the dominant system. He even hated the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He forgave me for being a member but we could not discuss it. The only political hope we shared was a wish for Scottish self-government. I enjoyed what I saw of Ireland but enjoyed his company less than expected. His hobbies were wrestling and judo. He told me that bodybuilders convert steak into muscle by a lifting weights immediately after a meal. I will say more about him because he gave me more than the first sentence of Edison’s Tractatus.

  He became Strathclyde University’s first Professor of Sociology in 1967, retired in 1989, died in 1991. His closest relatives were aunts with whom he lodged in a Glasgow tenement until they died long before he did. His job gave him prestige and colleagues. His holidays with the Hodgins in Tipperary gave him a family whose children regarded him as an uncle, a community which treated him as an equal. From a Labour Party member he became a xenophobic Tory. In the university staff club he once aimed a judo kick at a black visitor who was quietly minding his own business. His special study was trade unions, so in the 1980s he became a consultant of the U.K. government, telling Margaret Thatcher how to weaken them. He took self-conscious glee in the bowler hat, striped trousers, black jacket and waistcoat he wore on visits to Downing Street. I fear he harmed our democracy, but not me. Until 1974 he was my only steady patron, buying paintings and lending money when I was in need, usually taking a drawing as repayment. He lent money as if it was an ordinary, unimportant action, leaving my self-respect undamaged. I can’t type so he got his secretaries to type my poems, plays and the early chapters of Lanark, my first novel. They were typed onto stencils from which, when photocopying was expensive, they printed all the copies I needed without charge. In 1974 he arranged for the Collins Gallery of Strathclyde University to give the largest retrospective show my pictures have ever had, getting a Glasgow Lord Provost to open it.

  Yet in his last fiftee
n years I hardly saw him, maybe because I no longer had a family to support so had less need to push my work onto him. He retired as professor, became a recluse and solitary drinker, his human contacts being a cleaning lady and weekly phonecall from Greta Hodgins in Ireland. I felt sad and guilty when he died. He had given me much more than he ever received from me.

  Here are items which went into Edison’s Tractatus.

  1 In the 1960s I heard that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was a very brainy book. I thought it might not be too brainy for me but never got hold of a copy.

  2 I am too shy and pessimistic to start conversations with strangers but when public transport or an eating house places me beside an attractive one I sometimes fantasize about talking to them. This habit led to my first television play and a novel which is still in print. In 1982 I worked with Liz Lochhead, Jim Kelman and Tom Leonard on a revue called The Pie of Damocles. I scribbled a sketch in which a young woman at a café table asks a depressed young man to pass her the sugar bowl and he insists on discussing what this might lead to before refusing. My friends did not think it funny. I discarded it.

  3 I started hearing the word interface in the 1970s. It seemed to be used by people erecting a barrier round their work practice while talking across it. The barrier made the job they had mastered feel safer but conversation across it sometimes made new work, as forensic medicine had been developed from the interface between policing and doctoring. My facetious attitude to new words led me to link activities between which no interface was possible – the gap between Aztec pottery and Chinese obstetrics, for instance, seemed unbridgeable. Around the same time I heard a lecturer amuse a university student by referring to something as “an example of interdisciplinary cross-sterilization”.

  4 For several years I have been perplexed by the adjective post-modern, especially when applied to my own writing, but have now decided it is an academic substitute for contemporary or fashionable. Its prefix honestly announces it as a specimen of intellectual afterbirth, a fact I only noticed when I reread my brainy character saying so.

  5 A few years ago I heard that a scientist had shown how a butterfly stamping on a leaf in a tropical rain forest might precipitate a hurricane in North America. This may or may not be true.

  6 In the first months of 1994 I conducted a creative writing class at St Andrews University. Going home by train to Glasgow one day I sat opposite a young woman who was writing in red ink on a block of graph paper. I could not read her words but they were shaped with unusual clearness and regularity. She was slightly bigger than average, neatly dressed and with no apparent make-up or anything to catch the eye. I felt a strong prejudice in her favour, believing, perhaps wrongly, that she was unusually intelligent. I suddenly wanted to put her in a story exactly as she had appeared. She exchanged words with a young man beside her. Their conversation did not interest me.

  I broke my journey home at Markinch to visit Malcolm Hood in Glenrothes Hospital. Two years earlier he had been paralysed by a cerebral stroke: his brain was in full working order but his body could give no sign of it. He was now able to speak and move a little. On this visit I read him a story from Somerville and Ross’s Experiences of an Irish R.M. and occasional comments and snorts of laughter showed his enjoyment. When students at Glasgow Art School forty years before we had often read aloud to each other from amusing authors. My favourites were Max Beerbohm and Rabelais. Malcolm’s were Dickens and Patrick Campbell. Campbell – an Anglo-Irish humourist not much read now – probably gave us our first taste of Blarney, which I define as the employment of an Irish idiom to make an unlikely story more convincing. The Somerville and Ross Tale was full of it.

  When I boarded a homeward-bound train at Markinch Edison’s Tractatus was germinating. I scribbled most of it in a notebook before reaching Glasgow, and as I did so imagined an Irish voice saying it, an Irish voice deliberately constructing an improbable tale. That is why I gave it an improbable title. Were I to read it aloud I would do so in my Scottish accent voice, but when writing Edison’s Tractatus the sentences moved to a second-hand Irish lilt.

  7 This lilt must come from more than a fortnight in Tipperary thirty-five years ago and from renewed pleasure in the Blarney of Somerville and Ross. Flann O’Brien’s writings are an ingredient because, though Joyce, Synge and O’Casey use Blarney on occasions, O’Brien is the only Irish genius whose work is Blarney throughout. In the previous six months I had also read with pleasure This Fella I Knew, a short story by my friend Bernard MacLaverty who never talks Blarney and hardly ever writes it. This story is an exception. It appears in Walking the Dog, published in 1994.

  8 A week after scribbling the first version of Edison’s Tractatus a student in my St Andrews class asked how I got ideas for stories. I gave a long confused answer because each novel, short story or play seemed to form differently. What set it going might be a story I had read which I wanted to tell differently, or a day-dream, or dream remembered on waking, or a fantasy I had evolved during conversation, or an incident which had befallen someone else but was unforgettable because of its oddity, humour or injustice. Ideas have sometimes come from commissions to write on a particular subject. Thereafter the idea grew through an alternation of writing and deliberate day-dreaming. If a narrative drew in many memories, ideas and phrases which had lain unused in my brain it sometimes expanded to a novella, novel or play. All but my first novel came that way. The first came from childhood faith in a long printed story as my surest way of getting attention. I day-dreamed and scribbled it for years before accumulating enough ideas and experiences to finish it. I have also developed stories by telling or reading parts to friends before completion. Most authors I know avoid this because displaying unfinished work reduces their enthusiasm for it, but some listeners’ suggestions have expanded my tales in ways I might not have discovered myself.

  The student’s question produced this account of what went into Edison’s Tractatus. There is probably more than I am conscious of, but I believe the brainy hero is merely a caricature of traits which Andrew Sykes and I had in common. We were both inclined to turn sexual urges into clever, sometimes boring monologues. The urge to deliver an uninterrupted monologue is the energy driving most teachers, storytellers and politicians. Edison’s Tractatus is obviously a portrait of someone too wordy for his own good, which also explains the addition of this bit of intellectual afterbirth.

  * This is a long episode to a very short story, Edison’s Tractatus, in Mavis Belfrage, A Romantic Novel With Five Shorter Tales, Bloomsbury, 1996.

  The Fall of Kelvin Walker*

  FOR ALMOST SEVENTY YEARS before Margaret Thatcher’s government changed the licensing laws most Scottish pubs shut at 9.30pm. At that hour in the Hogmanay of 1954, outside The State Bar off Sauchiehall Street, I was being very drunk when I first met Robert Kitts. He and companions I knew took me to several parties in the homes of strangers, and as l sobered up we formed the kind of friendship only possible between a couple of imaginative young men who recognise each other’s genius. We were both students of painting (he in the London Slade), were both writing novels based on our childhoods, were both enthusiasts for Kafka, Herman Melville and Scott Fitzgerald whose Tender is the Night had been recently reprinted and recognised as a classic. The conversations started that night only ended when he returned to London, but on that night or the next we agreed that the natural outcome of our shared interest in visual and literary art was film making. Which Robert Kitts went on to do.

  In 1963, I was a social security scrounger, recently sacked from my job as scene painter and supporting my wife and newborn son by drawing National Assistance benefit from my Sauchiehall Street labour exchange. One morning I got a telegram from Bob Kitts asking me to phone him at the London BBC, reversing charges. I did so from a street call box. He said his boss, Huw Wheldon, might let him make a documentary film about my work, but wished to see me first. Could I come to the London TV Centre at noon, the day after tomorrow, a Thursday? I told him I cou
ld not: at 9.30am then I must collect my National Assistance grant from the labour exchange. (In those days unemployed labourers, tradesmen and professional folk all got their weekly state assistance in notes handed over the counter of a labour exchange.) Bob told me to phone him back in an hour. I did. He then said that on leaving the labour exchange I should take a taxi to Glasgow Airport, where a seat would be booked for me on a 10.30 flight. If I kept the taxi fare’s receipt I would be reimbursed. At London’s Heathrow I would be met by a Hertz Car chauffeur who would drive me to the TV centre where Bob would introduce me to Huw Wheldon.

  These were the great days of BBC Television. It had only two channels, colour was still to come, but none of its producers thought commercial television worth competing for so the quality of its productions were best in the world. Huw Wheldon, head of documentary and music programmes, was partly responsible for this. Like the BBC’s founding governor, Lord Reith, he thought broadcasting should provide more than popular entertainment. Wheldon catered for what he called “the small majority” of folk who not only enjoyed the best art of the past, but innovative art now. His liking for new ideas started the careers of Ken Russell, David Jones, Melvyn Bragg and also Bob Kitts, who would have become as famous as the rest had he not worked to promote an obscure actress (his first wife) and obscure artists, one of them me. For a while I enjoyed the luxury of air flights, taxis, meals in posh restaurants and talking as an equal to Huw Wheldon. The heady experience of starting a new career in the London of 1960’s television (which then seemed to welcome outsiders) was a delusion, but useful.

  Before going to London I amused my wife by saying that on meeting Wheldon I would speak before he had time to open his mouth, saying, “Before we proceed to the process of question and answer which is the purpose of this meeting Mr Wheldon, I must refer you to this stain on my jersey caused by mince which fell off a neighbour’s fork as I was dining earlier today. I had no time to change, so it is not my fault. But explanations like this must seem like swatting midgies to a man of your experience. I notice a small but perceptible stain on your neck tie. Might that be a bond between us?” This fantasy gave me the idea of a naive, brazen, pushy young Scot, with limitless self confidence because London was liberating him from a restrictive home life in Scotland. The thought of this character persisted with me. A year or two after Bob’s film was broadcast, memory began giving me details for more adventures. Twice a total stranger has introduced himself by saying, “Excuse me, but do you mind if I engage you in conversation?” Both times I had been in a café with friends who were also artists, as in those days our beards proclaimed. A man of about forty, a married coal miner, needed to tell someone about his helpless love for a hospital nurse, could tell nobody he knew, but thought strange artists might sympathise. A young man told us he had come to Glasgow from Greenock, because he wanted to meet artistic people. That, I saw, was how Kelvin would introduce himself to an attractive girl in a Soho café. She – Jill – was based on Jane Mulcahy, a real English friend and for a while the partner of Alan Fletcher, a great artist I knew who had died young. I had once made notes for a play about someone like me attracting someone like her away from someone like him, but gave it up as a bad job. I now saw it was just the job for my Kelvin Walker.