Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  Nature’s Oracle tells how Bill gradually overcame that prejudice, though some papers now widely accepted were first denounced as Fascist. He went on researching and publishing because he thought scientifically proved facts politically neutral, no matter what moral codes people choose to base upon them. Many left-wing people like myself were probably repelled by the title of Dawkins’ book which first popularised Bill’s ideas, just as it may have attracted right-wing thinkers of the anti-Christian Ayn Rand kind. The Selfish Gene could have been more accurately named The Altruistic Gene Functioning Between Near And Distant Relatives Of The Same Species, a more difficult name to remember, so less likely to help a book survive.

  My incapacity for mathematics unfits me to understand the whole range of the achievements that made Bill first president of the Human Behaviour and Evolution Society, but when I translate them into human terms they seem sensible. The heroism of sentry meerkats, the warning cries of small birds are like the willingness of thinkers to tell unwelcome truths, and why greedy dictatorships censor free speech. Bill thought the effects of genetic inclinations to xenophobia in social circumstances could be predicted, and did not doubt that extra-genetic altruism between those who shared unselfish ideas could act against it. He called behaviour which benefits our self and harms others selfish, which benefits our self and others, co-operation, which benefits others at our own expense, altruism. Behaviour damaging both our self and others he first called stupid then re-defined as spite. The purest example of spite is Hitler’s attitude before his suicide in the bunker – he hoped every German would be exterminated because it had let him down by failing to conquer Britain, Russia and the USA. The importance of spite is known to psychologists, but mainly ignored by historians.

  Nature’s Oracle is a success story because Bill did not fade out like most of us but died still masterfully investigating the nature of things, still open to new ideas and helping to generate them. Unlike many scientists he never rejected a suggestion by someone younger because it was unfamiliar or unproved, but reacted by first examining the evidence. He gave the Gaia hypothesis some support by recognising the part played by clouds in seed-distribution. He realised the fact that the brilliant variety of autumn leaf colours is not a just a sign of decay, but a pre-winter signal to attract or repel helpful or damaging insects.

  His death was partly the result of willingness to investigate an unpopular idea. He had written an introduction in 1999 to Edward Hooper’s The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and Aids. This book argued that the Aids epidemic had an African origin in the experiments there of pharmaceutical companies. Bill’s introduction said there might be truth in the argument. His mother Bettina, still alive and a qualified GP, told him he would make many enemies by doing so. He believed the argument could be settled by onsite analysis of the dung of anthropoid apes. He was flown back from Africa with what proved a fatal haemorrhage before finding any. His line of investigation may never be reopened.

  Since his death in 2000, some biologists who find his theory of altruism distasteful have been casting doubt on his kin-selection formulas in order to suggest he has undervalued co-operative traits. These include Nowack, Harvard professor of biology and mathematics, Wilson, an emeritus professor there and former colleague of Bill, and the mathematician Tomita. Their revision has been repudiated by the majority of biologists who find Bill’s concepts a useful source of new thinking and experiment. The value of scientific ideas can only be tested scientifically, so those who highly value Bill’s achievements need not be disturbed by attacks which will test them further.

  More than scientists will find Nature’s Oracle interesting. Bill’s sister Mary calls it a tour de force, while listing some factual errors easy to correct in a future edition. Ms Segestrale should be proud of this book.

  HELL: Dante’s Trilogy Part 1, Foreword

  There are more than a hundred English versions of Dante’s epic and every two years another appears. Readers want them because, like the Bible, they answer important questions with fascinating stories. But unlike the Bible no governments have promoted one excellent translation. None exist. To compress dramatic action, thought and dialogue into a huge urgent poem Dante invented a poetic form of three-line verses so cleverly unified by end-rhymes that most translators try to reproduce it. End-rhymes are easy in Italian because most of the words end in one of five vowels. They are harder to rhyme in English, so most translators get them with phrases seldom used in daily speech. My version mainly keeps the Dantean form colloquial by using end-rhymes where they came easily, internal rhymes where they did not. My abrupt north British dialect has cut Dante’s epic down from 14,233 lines to 8,912. This shows how far the range of my intelligence is less than Dante’s. Critics who cannot read the original should compare it with more accurate English translations.

  Here are examples of my abruptness. In Italy the heroine’s name is pronounced with four syllables: Be-a-trich-ay is a poor phonetic approximation to that beautiful sound. In English the name is usually spoken with two syllables, almost rhyming with mattress. My rhyme scheme needs three syllables: Be-a-tris. Other Italian names should be pronounced with as many syllables as Italians use.

  Dante mentions two political parties, Ghibelline and Guelph. The main difference (as in Britain’s eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) was between old and new money, the older class being landowners, the new one merchants. Like all two-party systems the difference was constantly blurred by changing local alliances or inter-marriage. I have translated these as Tory and Whig.

  Other excuses for mishandling Dante’s text will be in an epilogue to my Paradise translation.

  Postscript

  MY TITLE WAS ORIGINALLY SUGGESTED by Rudyard Kipling’s autobiography, Something of Myself, which said all he wished to make public. He may have agreed with Edgar Allan Poe on the impossibility of a truthful autobiography. Poe said: If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize the world of human thought, opinion and sentiment, let him write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple – a few plain words – My Heart Laid Bare. But – this little book must be true to its title. Now, is it not very singular that, with the rabid thirst for notoriety which distinguishes so many of mankind – so many, too, who care not a fig what is thought of them after death – there should not be found one man with sufficient hardihood to write this little book? To write, I say. If the book were written there are ten thousand who would laugh at being disturbed by its publication during their life or even after their death. But to write it – there is the rub. No man ever will dare write it. No man could write it, even if he dared. The paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.

  Poe’s language is melodramatic, but he had analysed his own emotions as thoroughly as Sigmund Freud and come to the same conclusion – that self-conscious feelings and behaviour – our characters – are largely shaped by desires we hide because we fear that only successful criminals, politicians and people in times of social breakdown enact them.

  The 20th-century acceptance of Freud’s ideas has abolished some polite inhibitions, at least verbally. Many writers now tip onto their pages matters that most authors used to carefully hide, but can now be openly sold. I am such a writer, as some of my fictions show, but though the foregoing essays were written with (I hope) disarming frankness, they do not tell how often I have been silly, petty and mean.

  And a full autobiography would have chapters about people I have not sufficiently mentioned, especially my mum, Amy Fleming. Writers say little about their mothers if they are not cruel because we take them for granted. They were the world and climate in which we lived, so became what we assumed about life – assumptions Sigmund Freud called subconscious. Like most men I was so aware of my great rival in her affections (my dad) that I have said much more about him. The brightly begun, obscurely ended career of Bob Kitts is one I should have said more about. There is Brian Smith, that agitating agitator and manic innovator of many things, s
uch as Festival Late in 1961, where I met Inge Sorenson, my first wife. There is Winnie Wilson (who I met through Joan Clarke) and Emmie Sachs, who I met through Winnie Wilson. In 1914 Emma had shaken hands with Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria, when she was a young voluntary nurse at the start of that war which changed everything. Her father had been a surgeon with the rank of general in the Austrio-Hungarian army. She told me about her love of Goethe’s poetry, and how she had never thought she was a Jew until Fascism after World War One made escaping to Glasgow a wise thing to do. Yet she loved the Vienna of her childhood so much that in the 1980s she returned to die in a nursing home.

  From my birth in the East Glasgow housing estate, I too have seen political changes almost as fantastic, and like all elderly folk I think most have been for the worse. But I knew many of those George Eliot mentions at the end of Middlemarch:– “The growing good of the world is greatly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs”. Democracy would let that good number rule us, but nations are ruled now by millionaires and oligarchs whose unearned incomes depend on increasing poverty. As Marx foresaw, this too will pass, perhaps before Capitalism destroys our supportive earth.

  I do not know if I will live long enough to write a wholly honest autobiography. I hope not, for it could only be done after those I love most are dead. And now some last lines of verse.

  last epigraph

  Some moments stay as fresh and clear

  as this morning or five minutes ago,

  though crowds of later, mostly forgotten events

  have killed or changed people I used to know.

  In nineteen sixty-one and the month we wed

  I pleased a whole roomful of folk so much that

  “I’m proud of you,” my young wife said.

  Our son liked to walk holding my hand

  for years before he was ten.

  If another boy came in sight we parted,

  walked like strangers until, round a corner,

  he thought it alright for us to join hands again.

  My marriage ended soon after.

  For a year my son disliked me once – not now.

  Queer how, near my own end, such old moments

  stay so uselessly fresh and clear.

  Sunk ships do not dream of wreck,

  storms or torpedoes that sank them.

  Their hulls recall wakening to the din

  of rivets finally hammered in,

  the glide down a slipway and how

  their bow first bit into brine

  that buoyed them up and out to sea –

  brine dissolving them now.

  Goodbye

  ‘I was absolutely knocked out by Lanark. I think it's the best in Scottish literature this century’

  Iain Banks

  ‘Unbelievably inventive’

  Ali Smith

  ‘Gray is a true original, a twentieth century William Blake’

  Observer