Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  I wrote the play quickly for television (no Scottish theatre existed to stage it) and posted it to the BBC drama department. Not having a television set I did not know my play was half an hour too long to be broadcast but James Brabazon, a BBC producer wrote to say he thought it could be cut down to fifty minutes, and could he come to Glasgow and discuss this with me? Of course! Once again I enjoyed the delusion of starting a splendid new career. When Mr Brabazon asked what actors I would like in my play I said I knew none, but would like Scottish actors in the Scottish parts.

  The Fall of Kelvin Walker was networked in 1968 with Judy Cornwall as Jill, Harry Corbett as Jake Whittington the painter, Corin Redgrave as my hero. The other 2 Scottish parts were played by an Englisman (well) and an Ulsterman (badly) because London BBC could find no Scottish actors available. But for 12 years this play led to Stewart Conn commissing me to write half-hour plays for Scottish BBC, and a good London literary agent, Francis Head, who got me commissions to write plays for the BBC and Granada in England.

  * A 1991 prologue to an edition of the novel, first published 1985 by Canongate.

  Poor Things: Acknowledgements

  Placed before the introduction to the novel issued by Bloomsbury in 1992, this truly acknowledges friends and books from whom I got ideas or words. It is my happiest novel, the three main characters all being good people yet not boring, though the narrator is – compared with the other two – unintelligent. It is my only attempt at a historical tale. These 2 prelims start putting the book into the retrieved manuscript school of fiction. When The Herald printed the first chapter Elspeth King, Mike Donnelly, Archie Hind promoted the veracity of the novels most fantastic parts by denouncing me for being wrong in some ordinary details. A few readers thought these friends had turned against me. The Introduction follwing starts as fact. I omit its fantastic ending.

  THE AUTHOR THANKS BERNARD MacLaverty for hearing the book as it was written and giving ideas that helped it grow; and Scott Pearson for typing and research into period detail; and Dr. Bruce Charlton for correcting the medical parts; and Angela Mullane for correcting the legal parts; and Archie Hind for insights (mainly got from his play The Sugarolly Story) into the corrupted high noon of Glasgow’s industrial period; and Michael Roschlau for the gift of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise (published in 1894 by MacLehose & Son, Glasgow, for the translator William Jacks, illustrated with etchings by William Strang, which suggested the form (not content) of the McCandless volume; and Elspeth King and Michael Donnelly, now of the Abbot House local history museum in Dunfermline, for permission to use some of their earlier circumstances to reinforce a fiction. The shocking incident described by Bella in Chapter 17 was suggested by the Epilogue of In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul. Other ideas were got from Ariel Like a Harpy, Christopher Small’s study of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and from Liz Lochhead’s Blood and Ice, a play on the same subject. Three sentences from a letter to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir, embedded in the third and fourth paragraphs of Chapter 18, are taken from Quentin Hoare’s translation of her letters published by Hutchinson in 1991. A historical note on Chapter 2 is extracted from Johanna Geyer-Kordesch’s entry “Women and Medicine”, in the Encyclopaedia of Medical History edited by W. F. Bynum. The epigraph on the covers is from a poem by Denis Leigh. The author thanks a close friend who wants not to be named for a money loan which allowed him to finish the book without interruption.

  Introduction

  THE DOCTOR WHO WROTE THIS ACCOUNT of his early experiences died in 1911, and readers who know nothing about the daringly experimental history of Scottish medecine will perhaps mistake it for a grotesque fiction. Those who examine the proofs given at the end of this introduction will not doubt that in the final week of February 1881, at 18 Park Circus, Glasgow, a surgical genius used human remains to create a twenty-five-year-old woman. The historian Michael Donnelly disagrees with me. It was he who salvaged the text which is the biggest part of the book, so I must say how he found it.

  Life in Glasgow was very exciting during the nineteen seventies. The old industries which had made the place were being closed and moved south, while the elected governors (for reasons any political economist can explain) were building multistorey housing blocks and a continually expanding motorway system. In the local history museum on Glasgow Green the curator Elspeth King, her helper Michael Donnelly, worked overtime to acquire and preserve evidence of local culture that was being hustled into the past. Since the First World War the City Council had given the local history museum (called the People’s Palace) no funds to buy anything new, so Elspeth and Michael’s acquisitions were almost all salvaged from buildings scheduled for demolition. A store was rented in Templeton’s carpet factory (which was soon closing down) and to this place Michael Donnelly brought troves of stained-glass windows, ceramic tiles, theatre posters, banners of disbanded trade unions and all sorts of historical documents. Elspeth King sometimes gave Michael help with this work, as the rest of her staff were attendants sent by the head of the art gallery in Kelvingrove and not paid to retrieve objects from unsafe buildings. Neither, of course, were Elspeth and Michael, so the very successful exhibitions they put on cost the City Council little.

  While passing through the city centre one morning Michael Donnelly saw a heap of old-fashioned box files on the edge of a pavement, obviously placed there for the Cleansing Department to collect and destroy. Looking into them he found letters and documents dating from the early years of the century, the refuse of a defunct law office. A modern firm had inherited what remained of the old business, and thrown out what it did not need. The papers mainly concerned property dealings between people and families who had helped to shape the city in its earlier days, and Michael saw the name of the first woman doctor to graduate from Glasgow University, a name only known to historians of the suffragette movement nowadays, though she had once written a Fabian pamphlet on public health. Michael decided to take the files away by taxi and sift through them at leisure; but first he called the firm which had put the boxes out and asked permission. It was denied. A senior partner (a well-known lawyer and local politician who will not be named here) told Michael that his look through the files had been a criminal act since they were not his property and intended for the municipal incinerator. He said every lawyer was sworn to keep a client’s business private, whether the lawyer inherited the business or not and whether the client lived or died. He said that the only sure way to keep old business private was to destroy proof that it had happened and if Michael Donnelly saved any part of it from destruction he would be charged with robbery.

  Of Anthony Burgess*

  BORN IN MANCHESTER, 1917, son of a shopkeeper (newsagent-tobacconist) who was also a pub pianist, Burgess was educated as a Catholic, got a Second-Class Degree in English Language and Literature at a Manchester University. He spent several complicated years of service in the British Army starting as a nursing orderly in World War 2 and ending as a teacher with rank of sergeant-major in Malaya. After that he became a teacher of English in what we British called The Middle East – Brunei, then Malaya. He learned the languages of these countries – became an expert linguist. In Shaw’s Pygmalion (the film adaptation) the great linguist says of a more internationally employed linguist, “He can learn any language at all in a fortnight – the sure sign of an idiot”. I disagree. I think one of his most interesting books is A Mouthful of Air, in which he briefly but respectfully surveys many Eastern and European languages including Scots Lallans, in an argument that schools should teach the phonetic way of writing words, to hear how people in other countries pronounced them.

  In the late 1950s he collapsed while teaching in Brunei and was invalided back to Britain with what was diagnosed as an inoperable brain tumour. In roughly twelve months he wrote to support his widow three novels, the first of 32, contemporary and realistic, historical but convincing, also satirical futuristic, because he lived for another thirty years though his first wife died. He published many kinds of
books, two of them autobiographies. He reviewed books and broadcasts for The Observer, The Guardian and The Listener.

  The last was a weekly magazine published by the BBC to review its broadcasts and to print the texts of interesting talks, latterly most of which were on the Third Programme. In 1964 Burgess reviewed Under the Helmet a TV documentary about my poetry and painting directed by my friend Robert Kitts. I remember the article was illustrated with a reproduction of my Cowcaddens Streetscape, which most excited me. Burgess responded to the programme by suggesting my poetry deserved closer attention, while doubting if the device of suggesting I was dead was a good idea. When I met him in 1981 neither of us remembered that indirect encounter.

  He had been invited to Glasgow by the Scottish Publishers Association to give a talk at the McLellan Galleries, and I was introduced to him at a small meal beforehand because my first novel Lanark had just been published, and Burgess had reviewed it, saying I was the first major Scottish novelist since Walter Scott. In the restaurant where we were introduced his first words were, “Congratulations! You don’t have an agent, I hope?” He seemed to me big, full of power yet harmless because ramshackle – not well organised. I liked that as it is how many people see me. He was thoroughly English but not posh, lacked the Oxbridge smooth manner that many folk acquire without having been to English private schools of the kind advertised as public, because only rich families can pay to get their children into them. Anthony Burgess was what was once called A Man of Letters. Sam Johnson, Goldsmith, Orwell were such. They lived by their writing in a hand-to-mouth way that made writers with secure incomes (mostly academics) think, “These people are not in our class.” But on that occasion Burgess and I exchanged no memorable ideas.

  Several years later Theatre About Glasgow, a subsidiary of the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, decided to take on tour a stage version Burgess had made of his novel A Clockwork Orange, and commissioned me to paint the scenery. The director told me of a phone conversation with Burgess who (I think) then lived in Malta, in which he told Burgess I was busy on the scenery. According to him this information was followed by some seconds of silence before Burgess roared, “Why isn’t he writing?” My writing has never had a greater compliment.

  * This is an obituary for a journal I have forgotten, so this text has been reconstructed from memory.

  Of Jack Vettriano*

  WE DO NOT WORRY about death and earning our living before walking and speaking. Our parents do these things for us, allowing us to feel the universe holds everything we need. For a year or two, sometimes longer, we are allowed to enjoy life played as a game played for the fun of it, for as soon as they learn to walk healthy children prefer to hop, run and skip. I once saw someone skipping alone under a lamppost at night and singing, “I’ve a laddie in America, I’ve a laddie o’er the sea, I’ve a laddie in America, and he’s goantae marry me.” She was obviously lonely so needed to sing of hope for the future and America was part of this.

  For her “shades of the prison house,” as Wordsworth put it, were closing round the growing child. Soon authority would tell her, “We sentence you to hard labour for life in field, factory, office or home. This will get you the money to enjoy some freedom in your spare time.” Most of us remember at least one horrid shock by which someone with authority over us demonstrated how unfree we were. Those who don’t have freedom must dream of it, for freedom is the human essence. Freedom for many people used to mean America. The USA was invented by people hoping for a better life, even though they bought slaves to make lives better still. From Scotland, Italy, every part of Europe, the poor and dispossessed poured into America until the gates were suddenly closed to them in the 30s. But the land of freedom and opportunity for all lived on in the Hollywood movies.

  At the height of the world’s worst economic depression before ours in 2013, Hollywood spun out Westerns, domestic comedies and crime thrillers showing the U.S.A. as a land of only two classes, the good and the bad, who all spoke the same language. A cowboy, sheriff, gangster, lawyer, office clerk or company boss, citizen or Senator might be good or bad, but if good they were buddies at heart, and spoke the same language. They married beautiful good women and lived happily ever after without working too hard. The bad guys also spoke the same language, unless they were English villains or more foreign still.

  Most British adults and their children found that good or bad American fantasies were more convincing than fantasies about life in Britain. They knew too much about Britain where freedom, beauty and happiness seemed the property of a class which speaks a language taught in universities and private schools.

  We know that the people Jack Vettriano paints are American because their clothes and the style of the women recall Hollywood films of the 1930s to 1960s era, a time when worldwide images of sexual excitement, adventure, fast cars, free and lavish lives were exported from the U.S.A. through posters, cartoon books, magazines, adverts, but films especially.

  The good-time girls, lonely women in dance halls, bars and hotel bedrooms could easily be Scottish. So could his men. The interiors and exteriors where we see them could easily be found in places we could all have visited in childhood or find in Britain today. The bright warm steady sunlight of his outdoor scenes strikes us as American because we don’t expect it in Britain, but when we were children on holiday we expected it and got it.

  There is nothing special about two young men playing cards on a bench by the seaside. Many young men play cards while on holiday. It’s a cheap and comradely pastime if you don’t stake big sums. Waistcoat and tie was the uniform of the respectable working man on holiday before the 1960s; only posh or bohemian types went in for open-necked shirts, even on very sunny days, but would a couple of Scottish or English friends have played a card game on a public bench in Portobello?

  No, only in America could a couple of pals expose themselves so shamelessly. Apart from some sadistic rituals in private rooms Vettriano shows scenes of very possible and commonplace freedom and glamour. If he didn’t translate them into American we wouldn’t believe him. And now, thank goodness, this former mining engineer with a talent for colour can sell his American scenes to people who talk the language of the British universities and expensive private schools. They, too, must have had fantasies of a classless free society. I wish we would all get together and make one.

  * From Fallen Angels, 1994, a book of paintings by Jack Vettriano, edited by W. Gordon Smith in which several writers chose one as the subject of a short essay.

  Lean Tales: Postscript

  IN 1971 DOCTOR PHILIP HOBSBAUM, who had recently started teaching English at Glasgow University, invited once a fortnight to his home a group of writers, mostly young and unpublished, to read and discuss each other’s work. Scotland was the third British kingdom, or province, where he had conducted writing groups after leaving the Cambridge of Doctor Leavis. In London his circle included Peter Redgrove, Peter Porter, George MacBeth and Edward Lucie-Smith. In Belfast there were Seamus Heaney, Stewart Parker, Michael Longley and Bernard MacLaverty. In Glasgow he brought together a number who lodged in the same square mile of tenements and terraces but, before entering his high corner flat on Wilton Street, had in many cases not seen or heard of each other. There was the American poet Anne Stevenson, the Skye poets Catriona Montgomery and Aonghas MacNeacail, with Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard, Donald Saunders, Marcella Evaristi, Chris Boyce, Alasdair Gray and Jim Kelman. Kelman was in his twenties, had been born in Glasgow and usually lived there though he had detailed knowledge of part of the USA, Wales, the English Channel Islands and London. He had recently become a family man, a position he still holds. Gray was an older Glaswegian who lived by painting and by selling infrequent plays to broadcasting companies. These two at first were indifferent to each others work. Gray was writing a novel which used the devices of fantasy to overlook facts which were essential to Kelman's prose.

  An author who liked Kelman’s work was Mary Gray Hughes, one of North America's best short stor
y writers. She visited the Glasgow group as a guest of Philip Hobsbaum and Anne Stevenson, and through her representations Puckerbrush Press of Maine published in 1973 Jim Kelman’s first collection of stories, An Old Pub near the Angel. This book is now sought by libraries with an interest in Scottish fiction, but on first appearing it brought the author little money or fame. A first book by an original writer, issued by a small foreign publishing house which cannot afford expensive advertising and distribution, will not be reviewed by many big newspapers and magazines, and will be lucky to pay for its printing costs. Even so, An Old Pub near the Angel did good. It proved to those who cared for such things that Jim Kelman was a professional writer. Ten years passed before his next book of tales found a publisher, but single pieces appeared regularly in the annual Collins Scottish Short Story Anthology and such publications as Words magazine and Firebird.