Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  Archie had an early love of literature and music. He and his brother both loved singing, and he learned piping in the Boys’ Brigade. Leaving school at fourteen he entered Beardmores, the largest engineering firm in Britain. It had built cars, planes, the first British airship, and still made great steam engines for ships and railway locomotives. By the late 1960s Scottish steam-powered industries were obsolete, but Archie joined the firm when World War Two was giving it a last lease of profitable life. For two years he was a messenger, reporting to Head Office on the progress of shafts and propellers shaped in the forges and turning sheds. He should have become an apprentice when sixteen, but his father wanted the higher wage Archie earned by shifting to a warehouse supplying local grocers. In 1945 or 6 he could have gone to university, since the last act of the government that brought Britain through the war had enabled any student to attend colleges of further education who passed the entrance exam. He could easily have done that, but it would have meant even less money for his dad than an engineering apprenticeship. He only left home when eighteen to do his National Service in the British Army medical corps for two years in Singapore and Ceylon.

  Which tells nothing about the birth and growth of his wide erudition and strong imagination through reading, close attention to recorded music and broadcasts, and intense discussion with those of similar interests. British professional folk often think creative imaginations unlikely outside their own social class – on first reading Ulysses Virginia Woolf thought James Joyce (despite his Jesuit and Dublin University education) had all the faults of a self-taught working man. Who in Glasgow could see the growth of an unusual mind in a twenty-year-old ex-Beardmores progress clerk, warehouseman and demobbed medical corps private? Jack Rillie could, the Glasgow University English lecturer who ran an extra-mural class in literature. Archie attended it and on Rillie’s recommendation went to Newbattle Abbey, the Workers’ Further Education College in Midlothian. The Principal was the Orkney-born poet Edwin Muir who, with his wife Willa, were the foremost translators of German language novels by Broch, Musil and Kafka. Archie became a friend of both.

  By now he had decided to write a book that he knew would never sell enough to support him – a book that would leave him a failure in the eyes of all but those who liked unusually careful writing. Soon after Newbattle Archie married Eleanor, a girl he had met through the Tollcross Park tennis club. She accepted him and his strange ambition while foreseeing the consequences, perhaps because her Jewish mother and Irish father came from people who did not identify worldly success with great achievements. Her mother had been brought from the Crimea to Scotland by parents escaping from Czarist pogroms, and like many Jews in Glasgow she attended left-wing meetings. At one of these she had met John Slane, a coalminer who learned to make spectacles while studying at night classes. They married and he became an optician successful enough, and rich enough, to buy Eleanor a beautiful Steinway grand piano and give it house room. But he hated her marriage to a man who supported his growing family by working as a social security clerk, trolley-bus driver and labourer in the municipal slaughterhouse between writing a novel that would never earn a supportive income. Archie and Eleanor made friends with writers and artists met through a new Glasgow Arts Centre which met in premises leased by the painter J. D. Fergusson and his wife Margaret Morris, founder of the Celtic Dance Theatre.

  I met them in 1958 when they had three sons (Calum, Gavin, Martin) and young daughter Nellimeg, whose mental age was arrested at less than two years by minor epilepsy. Their last child Sheila was born five years later. I had recently left Glasgow Art School and the Hinds had the only welcoming home I knew where literature, painting and music were subjects of extended, enjoyable conversations. It was a room and kitchen flat like that where Archie had been born, but in Greenfield Street, Govan. The room held the children’s bunks so social life was always in the warm kitchen which, despite many evening visitors, never seemed overcrowded. These were years when London critics thought Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Amis’s Lucky Jim, Braine’s Room at the Top, were a new school of literature created through the agency of the welfare state. These three works described working-class lads acquiring middle-class women. Archie and I thought they described nothing profound when compared with the best writings of Joyce and D. H. Lawrence, Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. We admired The Tin Drum, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse 5, and found we were both working on a novel about the only struggle we could take seriously – the struggle to make a work of art. This has been an important theme in poetry and fiction since Wordsworth’s Prelude. It inspired Archie most in the poetry of Yeats and fiction of Thomas Mann. He liked good jazz and American Blues, the songs of Edith Piaf and The Beatles, but thought most highly celebrated contemporary work – Beckett’s dramas, John Cage’s music, abstract expressionist painting and Warhol’s Campbell’s soup icons – indicated a thinning in the rich intellectual texture of Western culture. I was not so sure, but agreed that as writers we should maintain that texture. Our novels were both about low-income Glasgow artists doomed to failure, this coincidence worried us slightly, but we had chosen that theme long before meeting each other, and had to put up with it.

  In the middle 1960s the Hinds moved to Dalkeith where Archie worked with Ferranti’s Pegasus, an early computer filling nearly the whole floor of a building. He left that job to finally complete his novel, and having completed it, worked as copy-taker in the Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh, while awaiting publication. In Milne’s Bar he sometimes conversed amicably about sport and politics with Hugh MacDiarmid. In 1966 the novel was published in Hutchinson’s New Author series. Its title, The Dear Green Place, was Archie’s translation of glas-chu or gles-con, Gaelic words that became Glasgow. They had previously been translated green hollow, green churchyard, greyhounds ferry, dear stream, and (in imperial days when it was the second largest and smokiest city in Britain) the grey forge or smithy. Archie’s translation is now generally accepted.

  All good novels are historical – describe living people in a definite place and time. The Dear Green Place shows a city that had grown between 1800 and 1960, becoming for almost a century the second biggest in Britain. The earliest paragraphs give the layout – a city completely unlike London, for in Glasgow the homes of labourers, tradesmen and professional folk were intermingled with parks, shops, thriving factories with smoking chimneys and districts of old industrial wasteland. The time is about the 1950s when unemployment hardly existed and most of the labour force, though poorly housed by later standards, had the better wages and working conditions promised to the trade unions by the wartime coalition government. This Scottish region of the newly established British Welfare State gives Mat Craig the chance to occasionally dodge the commercial forces that, before 1939, would have made him an industrial serf, or political activist, or even destitute. He has enough room to exercise, however painfully, what was once a bourgeois or aristocratic privilege – the free will needed to attempt a work of art. The only other twentieth-century novel I know that places a writer’s struggle in an equally well imagined city is Nabokov’s novel The Gift.

  Published in 1966, The Dear Green Place won four prizes: The Guardian Fiction of the Year, The Yorkshire Post‘s Best First Work, the Frederick Niven and Scottish Arts Council Awards. The Hinds returned to Glasgow when, as foreseen, The Dear Green Place had not earned enough to support them. Archie wrote revues performed in the Close Theatre and a witty, precise political column for the Scottish International magazine. He worked for the Easterhouse Project, a privately funded meeting place started to reduce violent crime among the young when the Easterhouse housing scheme still had few shops, no cafés, playing-fields or provision for games and entertainment. Soon after, he was appointed to the position of Aberdeen City’s first Writer-in-Residence, later becoming copy-taker for the Aberdeen Press and Journal.

  By this time he was working on his second novel, Fur Sadie. Fur is how many Glaswegians pronounce for, and the title associates it with Be
ethoven’s piano piece, Für Elise, in a way that will make perfect sense when you read it. In 1973 the magazine Scottish International published a small part, but all that Archie wrote of it is published here for the first time, for I believe it an astonishing achievement, although unfinished.

  It is sometimes said that Scottish fiction has a more masculine bias than that of other lands, and though generally untrue it is true of much writing by authors like Alexander Trocchi, William Macllvanney, Alan Sharp, Alasdair Gray and Irvine Welsh. But The Dear Green Place makes it hard to include Archie Hind among these and Fur Sadie makes it impossible. Here he transposes (as musicians say) the theme of artistic struggle into the person of a small, ordinary-seeming, middle-aged yet very attractive working-class housewife and mother. In a few episodes her life between infancy and menopause is presented as richly detailed, generally admirable, stunted by too little money and leisure, yet capable of much more. Most British descriptions of working-class people suggest how horrid, or comic, or admirable that they live that way. The narrative voice of Fur Sadie is free of such condescension. He knows that better lives are possible, and shows Sadie working for one.

  Her portrait is deeply historical. Her childhood is in the pre-television age after World War 2 when city children still played and sang in side streets where motorcars were rarities. Many professional folk did not own one. Coal and milk were usually brought to homes in horse-drawn carts. As a housewife with working sons, Sadie need no longer heat water in a kettle because she has now an electric geyser above her kitchen sink. This innovation comes with a television set in her front room, but now she has saved enough out of her housekeeping money to buy a second-hand piano and pay for tuition to play it, knowing the expense will not worry her husband. A social revolution has happened through which we see the sexual growth of a woman and man from adolescence through early marriage to late, sad maturity. No other author I know has shown a sexual relationship over many years with such casual, unsensational delicacy and truth. That is essential to this tale of childhood friendship and a long-buried talent at last combining with a good music teacher to bring Beethoven (no less!) alive in the mind and fingers of an apparently ordinary woman.

  At this point, sometime in the early 1970s, Archie Hind gradually or suddenly stopped writing Fur Sadie and lost interest so thoroughly that he retained no copy. The first chapters published here have been edited from a photocopy he gave in the early 1990s to John Linklater, then Literary Editor of The Herald, who occasionally commissioned Archie to write book reviews. Even that had pages missing from the centre, but these were found printed in a 1973 edition of the Scottish International magazine, so though lacking a conclusion, the start is continuous.

  Shortly before Archie died in 2008, John Linklater asked him why he had not finished Fur Sadie. Quoting another writer he replied, ‘It developed a slow puncture.’ I know why this happened. Creative talent has mainly been excercised by middle class folk with some spare time and money, so in Britain there is a widespread sense that manual workers who practice it are aiming “above their station in life”, as Victorian snobs would have said, or aiming to become “traitors to their class” as working-class Marxists in his family did NOT say, but often hinted. In years of full employment Archie, who could earn money in so many jobs, often became what has been called, “a Welfare State scrounger,” to write a book he knew he would never earn much money. This knowledge weighed more heavily on him than on arrogant me. I was sure my work would one day be recognised by the state whose Social Welfare offices sometimes supported me. Archie was not. It is the theme of the one novel he completed.

  On reading the first chapters of Fur Sadie in the 1970’s I fell in love with the heroine. Archie had then been definite that the novel was going to end (unlike The Dear Green Place) on a triumphant note. How this would be achieved he never indicated, which forces interested readers to speculate. The book breaks off when Sadie’s piano playing has brought her domestic life to a crisis. She can no longer keep it out of her family’s earshot and even a neighbour has started complaining. How can her talent – her life – develop without splitting up what, by any decent standards, is a good marriage? For it is obvious that the important men in her life, husband, sons, and that great teacher McKay, cannot be reconciled.

  Yes, the theme of this book is that of Dickens’ Great Expectations, Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and most novels by D. H. Lawrence – the conflict between warm but constrictive working communities and a grasp for freedom outside it that operates like a curse, for how can a daily worker achieve emancipation without joining the damned upper classes? Sadie, however hard working and talented, is too old to become a concert pianist. It seems unlikely that she would join a band of popular musicians. Could she become a singer’s accompanist? Might she find support in her sympathetic older sister Mary? Her friend Anna vanished completely when Sadie’s schooldays ended – might she reappear, and to what effect? None of these questions can be answered. To present a problem our society has still not solved, and present it believably and sympathetically in mid-twentieth century Glasgow, is as much as could be expected of a writer having to earn a living in many other ways.

  This book ends with an example of Archie’s journalism, an article from the Scottish International of August 1973. The owners of the Upper Clyde Shipyards had announced the end of Glasgow shipbuilding, as they were preparing to invest in yards outside Scotland. The Glasgow shop stewards led their workers to occupy the yards in a well organised work-in. This was the first and biggest attempt to save a major Scottish heavy industry, and for several weeks that event brought Glasgow and its working-class spokesmen into the centre of British political news. The eventual failure of the effort heralded the steady asset-stripping and closure of every other major Scottish industry (coal mining, car manufacture, steel production, fabric weaving) through the rest of the century. This article shows Archie giving historic perspective to his eye-witness contemporary report.

  I wish the book also contained some of his early short stories (all lost) and playscripts from the ten commissioned and performed between 1973 and 1990. I especially remember The Sugarolly Story, a satirical view of Glasgow’s social history from the start of World War One to the creation of Easterhouse housing scheme. This was performed by the Easterhouse Players in the Easterhouse Social Centre after Glasgow City Council at last built one. There was also Shoulder to Shoulder, a dramatised documentary of John MacLean’s life. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropist, a Scottish dramatisation of Doonan’s building-trade novel, was biggest and most successful: the only one acted by a professional company (7:84) in a well known theatre (The Citizens). Scripts of these have all been lost, so this book holds all Archie’s available work. Lovers of literature will value it.

  The Dear Green Place, the start of Fur Sadie and Archie Hind survived into a century where his forebodings about the thinning of our cultural tradition (now called dumbing-down), has come true. Intellectuals calling themselves Postmodern claim objective truths do not exist, but are opinions in disguise. They now lecture in universities upon anything they like, because they think all artifacts equally valuable, and declare many once valued negligible. In a recent history of 20th century art an international dealer and critic celebrated the triumph of Installation and Performance Art while announcing that oil painting since Picasso is patriarchal and obsolete. Shortly before the 21st century ended a head of visual arts in Glasgow’s Art School said no artist need now learn to draw. Glasgow University has a department of Creative Writing where the kind of novel Dickens, Herman Melville, D. H. Lawrence and Archie wrote is labelled literary fiction, and taught as a genre no more worthwhile than crime, horror, science fiction and love stories publishers call chicklit. When future catastrophes have moved survivors back to serious agreement about important work in life and in art, The Dear Green Place and Fur Sadie will also survive.

  * An introduction I wrote to the Polygon publication of Archie Hind’s The Dear Green Place (never ou
t of print since first published in 1966) in the same volume as his unfinished novel Fur Sadie.

  Postscript to Fleck*

  AS A CHILD I WAS a glutton for stories of magic and miracles so came to know all the fairytales pantomimes are based on, besides the talking animals and animated toys of Kenneth Graham and A.A. Milne. The Bible was not among the books in our home – faith in education was my parents’ only religion – but at school my religious instruction was mostly Bible readings, so I came to know many tales about fiction’s oldest, most famous and most influential character, God the Dad.

  He fascinated me because (unlike his son Jesus Chirist who was probably real) God’s dealings with people were horribly unfair. He makes the first man and woman ignorant of right and wrong, but gives them easy access to knowledge of right and wrong in a fruit they are commanded not to taste. He has also given the garden a clever serpent (why?) who prompts them to eat it, which they do, for they can only know it is wrong to disobey God after doing so. For this crime they and their children are punished by lives of hard labour ever after. This single-parent God is obviously a twister, but a convincing twister, who contrives for his children what Ronald Laing calls a double bind: the situation of being wrong because they exist. Like other early gods the Ancient of Genesis liked the smell of burnt food. Adam and Eve’s son Cain tilled the soil so could only offer vegetables, so God preferred his brother Abel, a shepherd who roasted mutton for him. We are not told how God showed his preference, but it made Cain so jealous that he murdered Abel. It is good that God did not retaliate by killing Cain, but marked him so that others would know he was a public danger. Much later God tells the children of Israel “Thou shalt not kill” then tells them to invade Palestine and massacre the natives.