Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  My dad was also a member of the Readers Union Book Club which brought into our house in the late 1940s the works of James Joyce, Hemingway, Orwell and Arthur Waley’s translation of the Chinese Monkey epic and poetic anthology. Meanwhile Whitehill School was trying and failing to teach me Latin and Greek, but did introduce me to English literature from Chaucer to Conrad; and in Riddrie public library I discovered exciting translations of Heine’s Reisbilder and Sartre’s Nausea. I would be ungrateful if I did not mention the BBC Third Programme. This broadcasting network was set up with the help of émigré intellectuals of a Socialist sort driven out of mainland Europe by Fascism, but their outlook was, in the broadest sense of the word, catholic. It only broadcast in the evening between the hours of six and eleven, and broadcast nothing but music and plays and lectures which were labelled (in the slang of the forties and fifties) highbrow, but which contained no erudite jargon, so I hugely enjoyed it.

  Like many others in those days I believed Britain had attained a high new state of civilisation from which it would never descend. For over a century folk had striven against corporate greed to make this a land where everyone’s health care and education would be decided by their needs and abilities, not their parents’ wealth. This state lasted for nearly forty years. It helped millions of working class children join the professional classes. It let a grocer’s daughter become Britain’s prime minister, let me become an artist and author who would turn Smellie’s idea into a book.

  In 1987 Fiona Morrison got a publisher’s advance to let me work steadily on the book. I began by arranging prefaces I had chosen in chronological order, which gave my progressive view of history its first hard knock. Dates of the earliest works were not exact, but exact enough to show Chaucer did not lead a procession of great writers, he walked in a crowd of them – Langland, Barbour, the Gawain poet and others. After Chaucer’s death in 1400 the crowd shrank to a widely spaced line of pedestrians. Two centuries passed before such a good crowd of vernacular English authors jostled again, apart from a wee flurry of them in Lowland Scotland around James IV’s time. Why?

  I took so long to find out why that I used up the advance of my first publisher (Canongate of Edinburgh) though I also added the long introduction on Hebrew, Greek, Roman and Christian writing and prefaces to Anglo-Saxon works. In 1990 I tackled the effects of the Norman Conquest, and later discharged my debt to Canongate by giving it a science-fiction novel. I then raised money by writing more fiction and in 1995 resumed work on this book for Bloomsbury of London. It has now been announced so confidently for so many years that respected guides to modern first editions began saying it was published in 1989. (Joseph Connolly suggests £20 or less is a good second hand price, R.B.Russell puts it at £10.) Only now, on Tuesday 21st of December 1999, as I sit in bed recovering from flu, is the book being finally completed.

  Copyright costs have forced me to abandon my plan for a section of prefaces by great 20th-century authors, including those who now write Australian, Asian, African and Caribbean kinds of English. The book is only completed for the third millennium through help from nearly every writer I know well, and four in Glasgow University English Literature Department contacted through my friend Philip Hobsbaum. I admit to having tampered a little with some of their contributions (Janice Galloway says her commentaries on Bronte and George Eliot have Gray fingermarks all over them) but have nowhere contradicted their opinions. My main sorrow is that Chris Boyce, who gave notes for the commentary on Cowley’s preface to the History of the Royal Society, and Iain Crichton Smith who glossed Keats’ and Conrad’s prefaces, can neither receive a copy of this book, nor thanks for their help with it.

  I have slighter regrets. Like most who have worked for years on a job I see how much better it could be made if begun over again. I would include prefaces by William Morris and Henry James, and commentaries on all the twentieth century prefaces I cannot afford to print, and sixty four pages of notes at the end to support all my glib assertions in earlier pages. I would spend weeks redrawing the illustrations here and here to enhance their clarity, and would find something better than Dicky Doyle’s old Punch cover to introduce the Liberal English section which should have been called Liberal English, Irish, Scots and American. But I sympathise with Bloomsbury for stopping me continuing to revise for another year or two.

  These sixteen years of intermittent work have seen the dismantling of a Russian military empire established with USA and British aid in 1944. It has seen the world-wide triumph of international capitalism with United States and British armed forces as its most militant powers, so there has been no reduction of world warfare. Britain is entering a new constitutional period after a gigantic reduction of local government democracy, also the biggest sale of public property to private businesses since the dissolution of the monasteries in 1540, the abolition of common land in the 1820s. Even Britain’s public water supply, the greatest achievement of Victorian socialism, has been privatised, so a French company now owns a British reservoir. Despite protests by librarians the best of branch library stock have been sold and replaced by the kind of cheap paperback most newsagents sell. Despite protests by teachers our local school buildings are sold to private property developers, and schools in poor areas cannot supply their pupils with proper books, though deals with local businesses will equip them with continually replaceable word processors at the tax-payers’ expense. I consider this anthology a memorial to the education British governments now think useless for British working class children. But it has been my education, so I have to believe it was one of the best in the world.

  I started making maps when I was small showing place, resources, where the enemy and where love lay.

  I did not know time adds to land.

  Events drift continually down effacing landmarks, raising the level like snow.

  I have grown up.

  My maps are out of date.

  The land lies over me now.

  I cannot move. It is time to go.

  * Epilogue to my longest work of non-fiction (640 pages) published 2000AD by Bloomsbury. It had taken only a few years less to finish than my first novel.

  Sixteen Occasional Verses*

  POSTSCRIPT on what occasioned these foregoing verses

  THE FIRST OF MARCH 1990

  In 1990 the heads of print workshops in Glasgow and Berlin co-operated to make an artful book. They paid two professional writers and two professional artists from each city to live for a month in the other city and give the book (titled Vier + Four) writings and pictures based on their foreign experiences. That is how I came to be in the sky to Berlin on the first of March, and was later a guest of the Berlin Literarische Colloquium on the shore of the Wannsee when Berlin (her great partition wall about to be demolished and USA troops still deploying armaments in her suburbs) was the most politically complex city in Europe. I intended to write a verse diary of my Berlin experiences for Vier + Four but was unable to write more than this introduction to it.

  WINTER HOUSEKEEPING

  I used two houses in the winter of 1990-91, one rented from Glasgow District Council, one by the woman I was to marry. That made her home mine too, so I soon had as few as most people.

  WAITING IN GALWAY

  In April 1994 we went to Galway Literary Festival and enjoyed quiet afternoons in an uncrowded, unhurried pub with many intricate little corners. Blows can never be evaded for long and one will inevitably kill us, but in the snug of that small drinking shop and bedroom of a small hotel I felt that between blows peace can exist for life to be good, if addiction to peace is avoided.

  SOUTH AFRICA APRIL 1994

  More people have lived during the twentieth century than in the whole half million years before it, and more have been violently killed. The largest killings were in wars started by capitalist empires and by single party dictatorships. After 1950 several states created and maintained by violence ended without violence destroying them: the British and USSR empires, the dictatorships of G
reece, Spain, Portugal, South Africa. I wanted to celebrate the fact that unjust systems at last exhaust those who inherit them, that no human state is solid.

  GENESIS

  The start of the Jewish Genesis and the Christian Saint John’s Gospel that expands on it have been used by people in authority to suggest that the order of the universe derives from dictatorial words of command: an idea loved by those who want to be obeyed and many who like obeying them. Existential philosophy opposed that by saying the universe that generates us has no order but the order our own minds decide to impose. This view, though perhaps bracing for brave souls trying to change a crushing state of mind or society, may have led to the woolliness of some Postmodern theories. My wee poem suggests order is a pattern unfolded in simultaneous material and mental events, and neither has priority. No doubt this idea too is liable to corruption.

  POSTMODERNISM

  In 1995 I attended a conference about links between visual and verbal art. It was held in Elmira College, New York State, USA and ended in a debate dominated by a speaker who talked only about Postmodernism. He seemed sure that critics and lecturers were now entitled to read any idea they liked into a work, and illustrated the playful freedom this allowed by reading out twenty or thirty pithy, often humorous definitions of postmodernism, which he first said were quotations of writing by his students and finally declared were invented by himself. His energetic speech led to a discussion which said nothing about the links between vision and word and ignored descriptions of our intricate universe and how well or badly we live in it. Ideas Homer, Jesus, Shakespeare, Mark Twain etcetera thought important seemed irrelevant to the Postmodern speech game. Then chaos theory was mentioned with enthusiasm by one who seemed to think it a liberation from logical constraint instead of a logical way to solve problems.

  I remembered Pope’s Dunciad. This described fashionable criticism so divorced from common sense that it snuffs out the Word that Saint John said was the light of the mind, thus returning the universe to that earliest state which Jews thought a dark depth and the Greeks a mere chaos.

  The first seven lines of this poem are quotations from the start of Saint John’s Gospel in King James authorised version, the tenth line from Pope’s Dunciad but shifted to the past tense.

  DEAR COLLEAGUE

  Philip Hobsbaum wrote a bitter, funny poem in the voice of someone interviewing an applicant for a teaching job. The applicant is rejected because, though an experienced teacher, he has also written books. My poem ends by paraphrasing the end of Philip’s, which uses the conventional phrase ending most business letters in English.

  POEMS 9-15 INCLUSIVE

  These seven poems were suggested by the titles and images of prints by Ian McCulloch. They were written in August 1998 for Ian’s book of prints, The Artist in His World published by Argyll, of Glendaruel.

  TO TOM LEONARD

  While excepting God as the energy, form, matter of the universe and believing all religious beliefs are partly true, I dislike the division of God into father, son and holy ghost: a division I feel too human and masculine, yet also too abstract and theoretical to imagine. In October 1999 I was delighted to read God the Tree in translations from the poetry of Rilke. Rilke imagined a sixteenth century Russian monk who speaks of god’s Italian branch having an unusually sunny growth compared with the Russian branch, which none the less has its own unique growths. The brought to mind Scotland and Tom Leonard and let me end this collection hopefully.

  * Published 2000 by Morag McAlpine.

  Fifteenth February 2003*

  MY PARENTS TAUGHT ME that deliberately getting attention by unusual actions was bad manners – they called it showing off. By pleasing teachers, broadcasters, and others in authority I am now a published author and Professor of Glasgow University. Why should I walk with many others through the centre of Glasgow, complaining about a government that lets me vote to keep or change it once every five years? I am not driven by esprit de corps, team spirit, don’t enjoy feeling part of a crowd. I think most goodness, truth and beauty has been achieved by folk like Jesus, Galileo and Van Gogh who were out of step with multitudes. Soldiers marching together appal me as much as a line of high-kicking chorus girls appal most feminists. I only take part in political demonstrations when feeling it wicked to stay away: a state first experienced in 1956.

  I was then a student who, twice a week on his way to Art School, called at a clinic for asthma injections to reduce allergies causing asthma. As I bared my arm for the needle one morning a nurse treating me said,

  “’What do you think of the war?’

  ‘What war?’

  ‘The war with Egypt. We invaded it two days ago – we and the French and the Israelis.’

  ‘But… but what’s the BBC saying about it?’

  ‘The BBC hasn’t said anything about it yet, but it’s in all the morning papers.’”

  This war is called the Suez War because Britain and France were fighting to get back control of the Suez canal which Egypt had nationalised the year before. Israel was fighting because Egypt had barred it from what had been an international waterway. Like the USA’s war with Vietnam the Suez War was never openly declared. The British public and Parliament only heard of it on the third day when the government could no longer keep it an official secret. I hurried out of the clinic, excited by my certainty that public opinion would drive that government (a Tory one) from office in a week. I was naïve. Fellow students at the Art School were excited by the news, not all were horrified by what I considered a lawless action, even when the BBC broke silence and announced the RAF was bombing Alexandria, chief seaport of a nation without an air force. A friend who I thought was socialist said cheerfully, “The old lion is wagging its tail again!”

  Like journalists writing for some popular newspapers he thought the war a revival of imperial health. I heard an anti-war rally was being held in Glasgow University Union, rushed there and found it a rally against the USSR invasion of Czechoslovakia, which was happening at the same time. Like everybody else there I too decided to forget the bombed Egyptians in my sympathy for the invaded Czechs. The Suez invasion killed 22 Britons, 10 French, about 200 Israelis and 921 Egyptians, yet Britain and its allies lost that war because the United Nations, the Vatican and the United States condemned it – also the British Labour Parliamentary Party. Yes, I voted Labour then because Labour (I believed) had created a welfare state and abolished government by stock exchange (unlike the USA) and was part of a nation providing a democratic alternative to single party dictatorship (unlike the Soviet Union). I was grateful to the Labour Party for my healthcare, my further education and for condemning the Suez War.

  I was happier still when a large majority of local Labour parties voted for Britain to abandon nuclear weapons: another good example we were giving to the world. But the Labour Party leaders rejected the majority opinion of the ordinary members who had voted them into Westminster. On this matter Labour MPs sided steadily with the Tories. By 1965 the London parliament’s ability to turn local Socialists into British Tories had moved me to vote for Scottish home rule, which we are far from having achieved in 2003.

  Britain now has a government to the right of Mrs Thatcher’s, for hers spent more on social welfare than Mr Blair’s. So did John Major’s. Blair supports President Bush who has decided to break the Geneva Conventions by not just invading a country that cannot invade ours, but also occupying it in order to change the government. Bush declares that Iraq has acquired genocidal weapons of the kind the USA, Russia, Britain, France, India, China, Israel also possess, which makes us terribly nervous. To paraphrase Miss Jean Brodie, “Do not do as I do, little nation, do as I say.” Can anyone doubt that if the USA and Britain backed a United Nations plan to inspect and catalogue the dangerous weapons of every nation it would be implemented? Of course every nation would have to include the USA and Britain and Israel. Saddam possesses evil weapons because Britain and the USA sold them to him and the means of making them.
In the 1980s he was our ally and used them to exterminate many innocent Kurdish people, but now, in 2003, Kurds are fleeing into Iraq to escape from the government of our ally, Turkey. Certainly he arrests people on suspicion and imprisons them without trial or legal advice, but since 11 September 2001 George Bush’s government also does that.

  That Iraq contains more oil than any other single nation – that the USA would fall apart without cheap petrol – is one reason for this war. Another must be a widespread desire in the USA to see some brownish turbaned Islamic folk suffer what happened on 11 September 2001. An internationally orchestrated police investigation would not look sufficiently dramatic on television. The invasion of Afghanistan was not enough. It killed more civilians than those who died in the World Trade Centre, but bigger explosions, larger troop movements are needed by a President whose cuts in social welfare funding have damaged his popularity without curing a depressed US economy. The next election must be weighing very heavily on his mind.

  A third of the British troops taking part in this war and occupation will be Scottish, though Scotland has a tenth of Britain’s population. The Scots were hiring themselves out to foreign armies many centuries before our union with England. I regret that tradition so I am going to Glasgow Green, and thanks for a sunny day, God.

  Arriving with the wife and lawyer friend I am amazed by the many crowds spreading from the triumphal arch before Glasgow High Court to the People’s Palace in the east and Clyde on the south. All demonstrations contain weirdly dressed people who delight the hearts of antagonistic reporters, but here they are so outnumbered as to be invisible. Yet this multitude is splendidly un-uniform, though I hear the women of the Eurydice Socialist Choir singing a peace song and some vendors of the Scottish Socialist Party newspaper. There are people of every age, from toddlers in prams pushed by parents to elderly men like me. Some carry doves made of white polystyrene, there are many printed placards saying ‘Make War on Want, Not Iraq’, ‘Not In My Name, Mr Blair’ ‘No Blood for Oil’ and asking for Palestinian liberation. Some are less serious. A nice woman upholds ‘I Trust No Bush But My Own’, a stout bearded gent shows the ‘Dumfries Ageing Hippies Against the War’ logo. Two boys of ten or eleven walk carefully side by side wearing a single sandwich board made of card with slogans written in fibre-tip pen. They seem to have no adult presiding with them.