Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

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СКАЧАТЬ STEVENSON – Treasure Island. Kidnapped. Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The Master of Ballantrae. A Child’s Garden of Verses. Virginibus Pueresque.

      TROLLOPE – None.

      HARDY – None.

      BARRIE – None.

      KIPLING – Just So Stories. The Jungle Books. Puck of Pooks Hill. Stalky and Co. Seven Seas.

      CONAN DOYLE – The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. A Study in Scarlett. The Sign of Four. The Lost World. The Poison Belt.

      CONRAD – Youth. Casper Ruiz. The Shadow Line. Under Western Eyes. Chance. Last Essays.

      SHAW – The Black Girl in Search of God. (Here follows the titles of the 43 plays Shaw had published in 1934, and I had read in a book my father owned, to which I added:) Scraps and Shavings. An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Capitalism, Socialism and Fascism.

      H. G. WELLS – The Time Machine. Collected Short Stories. The Invisible Man. The War of the Worlds. The First Men on the Moon. The Island of Dr. Moreau. The Food of the Gods. The History of Mr. Polly. Tono Bungay. The King Who Was a King. A Study of History. An Experiment in Autobiography. The Shape of Things to Come.

      JACK LONDON – None.

      SIEGFRIED SASSOON – None.

      H. V. MORTON – None.

      WODEHOUSE – None.

      BENNETT – The Card.

      BUCHAN – The Thirty Nine Steps. Prester John. The Powerhouse. Greenmantle.

      HUGH WALPOLE – Mr Perrin and Mr Trail. Jeremy.

      NEIL MUNRO – The Daft Days.

      OTHER AUTHORS AND TITLES – Voltaire’s Candide. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Sentimental Journey. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Fielding’s History of Jonathon Wilde The Great. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Hugo’s Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford. Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass. Kingsley’s Waterbabies, unabridged. Huxley’s Brave New World, Ape and Essence. Orwell’s Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People. Edward Lear’s The Complete Nonsense. Hendrick Van Loon’s Home of Mankind, Story of Mankind, Arts of Mankind, Liberation of Mankind. Goethe’s Faust Part I.

      The above list was not wholly truthful as I wanted my teachers to think me a greater scholar than I was – a greater scholar than they were. I had read only a little beyond the start of Barnaby Rudge and Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. I stopped reading the first because I am impatient of man-made mysteries and Dickens’ 18th century convinced me less than Conrad’s. I recoiled from the second because I hated to read of lives ruined early by treachery. Nor had I read Arnold Bennett’s The Card. I had heard a radio talk on it with dramatized excerpts, and knew I could answer questions on it that would satisfy any adult.

      Nor had I read more than a few pages of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Capitalism etcetera. To this day I cannot thoroughly read a work of politics, sociology or philosophy which does not describe particular instances. Shaw’s treatise may have had many, but his title made me doubt that. But I had read enough to grasp and believe that the more just society is, the more essential to it is everyone’s work, and the more equal are their incomes, which I still believe. And I had only dipped into a few chapters of Well’s Study of History in the Pelican paperback version.

      Explaining how, and where, and when I came to read the other books would take at least a year, so I will comment on very few. The complete plays of Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen stood on the middle shelf of a bookcase in my parents, beside Carlyle’s French Revolution, Macauleys Essays, The History of the Working Classes in Scotland and Our Noble Families by Tom Johnson, a Thinkers library volume called Humanities Gain from Unbelief, an anthropology of extracts from atheists called Lift Up Your Heads, a large blue-grey bound volume with The Miracle of Life stamped in gold on the spine. This contained essays on The Dawn of Life, What Evolution Means, Life That Has Vanished, Evolution as The Clock Ticks, The Animal Kingdom, The Plant Kingdom, Man’s Family Tree, Races of Mankind, The Human Machine at Work, Psychology Through the Ages, Discoverers of Life’s Secrets. The 476 pages (excluding the index) were half given to black and white photographs and diagrams. The middle shelf also held Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism and The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God.

      The last was perhaps the first adult narrative brought to my attention at the age of three or four. I cannot remember that though was told of it later. I recall discovering it in my middle teens among my dad’s books and enjoying it greatly. He then told me he had read it to me when I was wee. The story is an evolutionary fable about human faith, told through the quest of a black girl through the African bush. Converted to Christianity by an English missionary she sets out to find God, but doubting he can be found on earth, and encounters in various dealings the gods of Moses, Job and Isaiah, then meeting Ecclesiastes the Preacher, Jesus, Mahomet, the founders of the Christian sects, an expedition of scientific rationalists, Voltaire the sceptic and George Bernard Shaw the socialist, who teach her that God should not be searched for but worked for, by cultivating the small piece of world in our power as intelligently and unselfishly as possible.

      The moral of this story is as high as human wisdom has reached, but I cannot have grasped it then. My father told me that I kept asking, “Will the next god be the real one daddy?” No doubt I would have liked the black girl to have at last met a universal maker like my father: vaster, of course, but with an equal vital sense of my importance. I’m glad he did not teach me to believe in that, for I would have had to unlearn it. But my first encounter with this book was in a prehistory I have forgotten or suppressed, though I returned to it later. It was a beautifully made book with crisp clear black-woodcuts decorating covers, titlepage and text. These were by a young artist called Farrel, obviously influenced by Eric Gill, and like the text it blended the mundane and exotic. A few days ago I learned how closely Shaw worked with Farrel, suggesting some illustrations with preliminary sketches of his own, as Lewis Caroll had worked with Tenniel on the Alice books.

      This was all on the middle shelf of the bedroom bookcase. The shelf above was blocked by orange-red spines of Left Wing Book Club, four fifths of it being the collected works of Lenin in English: dense text with no pictures or conversations in at all. The bottom shelf was exactly filled by the Harmsworth Encyclopedia, because the bookcase had been sold along with the Encyclopedia by the publisher, who owned the Daily Record in which they were first advertised. This contained many pictures, mostly grey monochrome photographs, but each alphabetical section had a complex line drawing in front, a crowded landscape in which an enthroned figure representing Ancient History (for example) was surrounded by orders of Architecture, an Astronomical telescope, glimpses of Australia and the Arctic with Amundsen, and an Armadillo and Aardvarks rooting around a discarded anchor. I gathered that these volumes contained explanations of everything there is and had been, with lives of everyone important. The six syllables of the name EN-CY-CLO-PAED-I-A seemed to sum up these thick brown books which summed up the universe. Saying them gave me a sense of power confirmed by pleasure this gave my parents. But the four colour plates showing flags of all nations and heraldic coats-of-arms gave an undiluted pleasure which was purely sensuous. I was fascinated by the crisp oblongs holding blues, reds, yellows, greens, blacks СКАЧАТЬ