Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  Q. What do you mean?

  A. Look – they go to their local school, get crammed for their local university, come reluctantly, contribute nothing socially or culturally, leave with some kind of degree, and all the time live with mummy and daddy. What do they know of life? What will they ever know? Am I to teach Joyce and Lawrence to a bunch of ciphers?

  Q. What do you think they should do?

  A. If they must stick to Scotland, at least go to some other university. Then they’d have a chance of fending for themselves, of making new social contacts.

  Q. How if financially they have to come here?

  A. I don’t believe it. But if they must, then let them leave the country when they’ve graduated. They can always come back when they’ve grown up.

  Q. ‘Scotland needs them’ ?

  A. Scotland does need all its young people, if only to rescue the country from the bunch of dead-heads and lame-brains who run it now.

  Q. What have you in mind?

  A. Let’s name no names. But I notice when – by sheer chance, it must be – the Citizens Theatre employed a director with some courage and originality, the board of management fired him. Who are they, for God’s sake? Have they never heard of the freedom of the artist?

  Q. The freedom of the artist to lose money?

  A. Their pop shows lost even more. Look at The Knack a couple of years ago. I don’t notice that bunch of characters training an audience. They’re too comfortably entrenched. Arty, maybe: but not artists.

  Q. So do you think there’s no room for artists in Glasgow?

  A. Yes, yes, dozens of them. But we have to fight the milieu. We have to let them know that education is not separable from art. We have to shake up some of those dull thicks who pose as patrons of the arts. We have to combine posh Scottish International with underground Henry’s Magazine. We have to appoint artists as permanent staff of our university. We have to appoint a good young Scottish director to our Theatre and give him his head – and let him appoint playwrights to his staff. We have to sweep away the tired old men who’ve represented Scottish culture for so long – you can hear them on George Bruce’s Arts Review any given month – and replace them by young men who are still doing things. We – but I really mean you – have to do this.

  Q. You don’t include yourself. So Scotland’s defeated you?

  A. Let’s not be smug about it. I was a force in London, because London is an anthology of exiles. I was able to help out in Ireland because the Irish are only too glad if anyone takes notice of them. But the mixture of insularity, philistinians and complacency here has been a bit much for me.

  Q. You find the fault in the modern Scotsman?

  A. The modern Scotsmen I’ve met don’t want anything to happen. They always find good reasons for not having done anything. That crushes all creativity.

  Q. Would you vote Scottish Nationalist?

  A. I intend to. The Scots deserve Scotland.

  END

  The A. Nicolson in the heading is now better known as the Gaelic poet Aonghas MacNeacail, once also called Black Angus before his bushy beard and hair turned snow white. He told me he and other Gum editors met Philip in a pub to discuss an interview, and at the end of an interesting talk he gave them the foregoing questions and answers, telling them, “Print that!” which they did. It was obviously written at a bleak time in his life when its one bright spot was having the American poet Ann Stevenson as his companion. But it was also a bleak time for Scottish culture. The view he gives of it here was not false, indeed, is still partly true, in that hardly any Scottish artists have administrative posts in Scottish institutions.

  But luckily Philip did not leave Glasgow in 1969, for by 1970 he had found a group of writers as strong as those in Belfast – Liz Lochhead, Tom Leonard, James Kelman and many others. All these (and I include myself) had gained confidence in our distinctive voices before we met him, but we only slightly recognised each other before he brought us together. Several of them who are less widely known are still among my closest friends.

  I am sure Philip’s vote got me the job of Glasgow University’s Writer-in-Residence in 1977 when I desperately needed a steady income for work that would not stunt my writing ability. He even lived to see three published authors he respected made joint Professors of Creative Writing at Glasgow University, though he died after the three of us gave up Professoring as a bad job because new financial pressures to enlarge classes while lowering the quality of teaching was more than we could stand. I wish he had used his university post as a base from which to edit a literary magazine as he had done at Cambridge, where he published the early poems of Ted Hughes and Peter Redgrove. In 1968 the notion that he would work until retirement in Glasgow University, and die in Glasgow a few years later, would have struck him as a nightmare.

  * This essay contains some of an obituary for The Independent newspaper commissioned from me and printed 28th June 2005. The Seamus Heaney quotation is from Belfast, the essay published in Preoccupations, Selected Prose, 1968-78.

  Self Portraiture*

  LONG BEFORE LEARNING TO WRITE I was given paper, pencil and crayons by parents who liked me using them, so from then until late adolescence I made pictures of imaginary worlds where my miraculous powers won battles, immense popularity and the love of gorgeous queens. These pictures showed queer people, monsters, machines, architecture and landscapes: never images of me because my appearance was childish and ordinary. Art was my escape from the ordinary, which included family and the pleasant modern Glasgow housing scheme where we lived. What was commonplace bored me. Only its cinemas and public library gave me exciting visions of exotic worlds.

  But I enjoyed showing my artistic ability to folk with different ideas for pictures, and when sixteen made a self-portrait in a way suggested by Robert Stuart, head of Whitehill Secondary School art teaching. With Indian ink, pen and brush and using a small mirror, I drew my face lit strongly from one side, painting the areas of shadow on the other side a solid black. Such portraits were meant to be turned into lino-cut prints, though I did not do that. The dense shadows added no strength to a slightly bun-shaped face whose most distinct feature was a pair of spectacles. But less than three years later that technique suited my mood when making a self-portrait at Glasgow School of Art.

  By then my mother had died. For several weeks the need to earn money had looked like stopping me becoming an artist. My face was now thinner and more angular. Having left Whitehill I had lost my companions there and not yet found others, hence this bid to interest onlookers in my stoical loneliness. The lamp-lit night scene behind was to justify the ominous facial shadow; it also shows my imagination at last using bits of Glasgow: exciting, recently discovered older bits. Most of the building behind the head was in Drygate, a small valley between Duke Street and the Necropolis. Duke Street at the top has been replaced by a section of the Monkland canal. More than Bob Stuart’s teaching went into this picture. When much younger I had unconsciously learned a lot from children’s book illustrations about combining areas of solid black and white with linear shading, especially Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. Later I discovered Blake’s The Gates of Paradise, works by Aubrey Beardsley and Munch. Though more painter than graphic artist, Munch’s stark contrasts of dark and light in his canvases fascinated me; so did his subject matter. If interiors, streets and landscapes in Norway circa 1900 provided a great artist with strong subjects, why should not 1950s Scotland? I had also learned the same lesson from Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I now knew the world once dismissed as ordinary contains all the best and worst adventures that could happen to me.

  So while still painting apocalyptic and fabulous events I came also to draw, as accurately as possible, people I knew and liked in their own homes. It was my way of stopping them leaving me. Four years after art school I entered a marriage that lasted nine, and made many pictures of my wife and son, a few of myself. Good white expensive cartridge paper usually intimidated me bec
ause my first efforts were torn up as mistakes. Most were drawn on blank wallpaper, on newsprint paper, or on a tough, slightly porous paper from a wad found in a derelict factory. Having made some lightly-pencilled guidelines soon rubbed out, I drew the whole thing without stopping in an hour, more or less, using a black ballpoint or else a Radiograph pen. The last, a recent German invention used by architects and engineering draftsmen, resembled the ballpoint in making firm lines that did not darken or lighten with the hand’s pressure like pencils, or change thickness with the angle of the nib like script pens. These drawings from life had no conscious exaggerations, and the only consciously eliminated details were very fine wrinkles my strong line would have grossly thickened. If the final drawing looked complete the portrait was finished; if not it was pasted onto a rigid panel and the figure made more distinct (more real, I thought) by tinting hair, clothes, adjacent furniture and background, using two or three mediums: watercolour, emulsion, acrylic, oil paint, crayon. These tones and colours were added in the sitter’s absence, and darkened or brightened to add believable variety without obscuring what William Blake called ‘the bounding lines.’ He deliberately used an adjective with two meanings, because the outlines of a pictured body can both circumscribe its colours and have an urgent vitality of their own.

  This third picture, though drawn on untypical white paper, shows my usual method. My reflection was copied from a mirror laid flat on a drawing board so viewers see it as I did, from beneath. The ceiling beyond was the same pale plaster as the cornice and centre moulding: I painted it yellow to make the head look much nearer, then tinted hair, face etcetera grey to indicate the shadow cast by the electric bulb overhead. Details outside the reflecting glass (the mirror’s beaten copper frame, artist’s left sleeve, paper on which the mirror lies) are left plain outline except for the solid black Radiograph and a grey tint on the hand holding it.

  The least frequent kind of self-portrait shows an artist placed dramatically with someone he knows. At the most prosperous time of his long career Rembrandt painted himself seated at a banqueting table with his young wife on his knees, both richly dressed. One hand clasps her waist, the other holds high a glass of wine, he faces the onlooker over his shoulder, laughing heartily. Nearly two and a half centuries later Goya dedicated a double portrait to a doctor who helped him through a bad illness, and is shown supporting the suffering artist in bed and gently holding a glass of medicine to his lips. Fig.4 shows a less sympathetic double portrait: me and the standing figure of my first wife in the basement kitchen of 160 Hill Street. Our skins are the colour of the newsprint paper, the surface of the door behind most of Inge was solid grey as shown, but our chequered linoleum floor would have obscured her black-stockinged ankles, so was painted silvery blue. Door frame and skirting board were white as shown, the actual wall not much darker, but here made black to strengthen a composition nearly pulled in two by the divergent expressions of our faces. The look of angry dissatisfaction on Inge’s face was often hers but other drawings showed her content or wistful or sad: seldom happy, because happiness is the most fleeting expression on any adult face.

  Good portraits, unlike good caricatures, never reduce a face to one or two simple expressions of cunning, mirth, greed, kindness, brutality etcetera: feelings that change our features from moment to moment until brought to rest in sleep, or steady concentration, or in the sort of meditation that can be induced by staying still to be portrayed over a long time. This state of rest contains all a sitter’s potential expressions so are not so easily read. They show unique people at a certain age with some general traits like social confidence tinged with melancholy or good humour, but seldom more and often not as much – hence arguments about whether or not Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is smiling or Hal’s Laughing Cavalier laughing. Social class is usually suggested by clothing. From Holbein’s portrait of Henry VIII we might guess he had been a much-admired, jolly, companionable man; not that he was becoming a cruel, suspicious megalomaniac. But what of SELF-portraits?

  The greatest novel of all, War and Peace, had a shy, plain heroine whose face becomes lovely when she forgets herself. She never notices her attractive appearance because, when approaching mirrors (says Tolstoy) ‘As with everyone, her face assumed a forced, unnatural expression as soon as she looked in a glass.’ With everyone? I expect so. This would explain why, when unexpectedly confronted by our reflection in a mirror we did not know was there, it takes a moment to recognise ourselves. So how can artists deliberately confronting themselves in mirrors avoid a forced, unnatural expression? Answer: easily, because we can only depict our faces bit by bit, starting with an eye or eyebrow, the edge of a mouth or nostril, the curve of a cheek. Our eye explores our contours like an insect crawling round each, while our hand sets down what the insect discovers. Careful concentration will banish anything stiff and unnatural from the artist’s face, just as it departs from the face of anyone who gets accustomed to a portrait sitting. There is one important difference.

  Since a very complicated arrangement of mirrors is needed to paint oneself in profile, most self-portraits show artists looking searchingly into their own eyes, and in many of Van Gogh’s the expression is gloomy and haunted. It changes after his hospitalisation. Beardless, with bandaged ear, he now has a sad look of loss and resignation, but in both sorts it would be phoney to suggest that this face is the face of a Dr Jekyll discovering Mr Hyde in himself. Both are as true to him as are all of Rembrandt’s, from the time he shows himself as a rich jolly toper to the great final portraits of an old man calmly confronting himself and death and posterity. Any artist making an honest self-representation is more completely in mental harmony (I believe) than any politician making speeches, or any boss giving orders, or anyone doing repetitive labour that excludes their imagination and intelligence.

  Having referred to self-portraits by many great artists I now have the conceit to speak of my own best: the only one to attempt subtle chiaroscuro. It was drawn at night, in bed, by the light of the small bedside lamp whose plastic shade is part of the composition. It was drawn from a mirror laid on my lap so again presents an upward view of someone who is now distinctly glum and middle-aged. This is not quite all of my character for in company I seem to talk and laugh a lot, perhaps a sign of nervousness. And like all folk truly devoted to their work – not just artists – there lies in doing it a satisfaction we prefer to other forms of happiness.

  * This essay was commissioned for DIVIDED SELVES: The Scottish Self-Portrait from the 17th Century to the Present, published by the Talbot Rice Gallery of Edinburgh University in 2006 for the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation. Edited by Bill Hare and Polly Bielecka, essays by Vicky Bruce, Cairns Craig, Gavin Miller, Jonathan Murray and me. Illustrated with my self-portraits from the age of 16 to 70, my essay aimed to contradict the notion that Scotland has more split personalities than other lands.

  New Kelvingrove*

  IN 1946 I WAS ELEVEN, LIVING IN RIDDRIE, an eastern housing scheme whose people thought it very posh, as I hope they still do. I usually spent spare time in my bedroom, at a small version of a senior executive’s desk my dad had made when his hobby was carpentry. Here I sat scribbling pictures and illustrating stories of magical worlds where I was rich and powerful. One day mum put some of my scribblings in a handbag and took me by tram to Kelvingrove. She had read in a newspaper that Miss Jean Irwin held an art class on Saturday mornings in Kelvingrove, and I believe (though she never said so) that class would get me out of the house and give me more friends. Children in it were supposed to be recommended by teachers, but my mum was an independent woman. A half hour tram ride brought us to Kelvingrove, not yet open to the general public, but she swiftly got admission from an attendant who explained where to go. We went up broad marble stairs and along to a marble-floored balcony-corridor overlooking the great central hall, and I heard exciting orchestral music. At the top of more steps we saw twenty or thirty children busy painting at little tables before very high windows, painting
to music from a gramophone, as record players were then called. I drifted around looking at what these kids painted while mum showed my scribbles to Miss Irwin, who let me join her class. For the next five years Saturday mornings were the happiest time of the week. Friday night was bath night. Next day I rose to a clean change of underwear, shirt and socks, so left the house feeling unusually fresh. If the day was warm enough to go without a jacket I felt the whole city was my home, and that in Kelvingrove I was a privileged part of it. The art class children came an hour before the public were admitted, I was always earliest and could therefore take the most roundabout way to the painting place, starting with a wide circuit through the ground floor.

  I first turned right through a gallery with a large geological model of Strathclyde near the door. It had a pale blue river, firth and lochs, and layers representing rocks painted to show how the valley and hills had been laid down in prehistoric times pink sandstone predominated. Beyond were glass cases of fossils, including an ichthyosaurus, and uncased models. The tyrannosaurus was most impressive, and a great ugly fish with two goggle eyes near the front of his head instead of one each side, and big human-looking buck teeth. I left that gallery by an arch under the skull of a prehistoric elk with antlers over six feet wide.

  Then came modern natural history, the shells and exoskeletons of insects and sea-beasts, a grotesque yet beautiful variety showing the unlimited creativity of the universe. Some I hardly dared look at and would have preferred them not to exist. A spider crab had legs splayed out as wide as the antlers of the elk. Then came stuffed birds and animals in cases with clues to their way of life. I seem to remember a fox bringing a pheasant’s wing in its mouth to small foxes under a shelf of rock or under a tree root. Big animals were in a very high gallery behind large glazed arches. An elephant with its young one, a giraffe and gazelle had a painted background of the African veldt; an arctic scene had walrus, seal and polar bear with fake snow and ice floes. A Scottish display had stag, doe and fawn, capercaillie and grouse among heather.