Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

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СКАЧАТЬ marriage when I asked about it, which was hardly ever. This reticence included his experiences of fighting in France between 1914 and 18. There was an exception to this in my late teens when I had bouts of asthma. These sometimes made me feel all life and history was a bad disease, a disease which could only be cured by a God of Love in whom I had no faith despite all Christian churches praying to Him. A Socialist and Agnostic, my dad believed with Marx that humanity would one day solve every problem it had the sense to recognise. As he could not persuade me of this he tried to help by introducing me to his parents’ God in ways which respected their faith and his own. I made a note of these words, which told some things his written account does not, and eventually I paraphrased them in the 26th chapter of my first novel.

       “My father was elder in a Congregational church in Bridegton: a poor place now but a worse one then. One time the well-off members subscribed to give the building a new communion table, an organ and coloured windows. But he was an industrial blacksmith with a big family. He couldnae afford to give money, so he gave ten years of unpaid work as church officer, sweeping and dusting, polishing the brasses and ringing the bell for services. At the foundry he was paid less the more he aged, but my mother helped the family by embroidering tablecloths and napkins. Her ambition was to save a hundred pounds. She was a good needlewoman, but she never saved her hundred pounds. A neighbour would fall sick and need a holiday or a friend’s son would need a new suit to apply for a job, and she handed over the money. But there was something wrong with me. Then the 1914 war started and I joined the army and heard a different kind of prayer. The clergy on all sides were praying for victory. They told us God wanted our government to win and was right there behind us, with the generals, shoving us forward. A lot of us in the trenches let God go at that time with no fuss or remark, as if it were an ordinary thing to do. She got a lot of comfort from praying. Every night we all kneeled to pray in the living room before going to bed. There was nothing dramatic in these prayers. My father and mother clearly felt they were talking to a friend in the room with them. I never felt that, so I believed Duncan, all these airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky notions are nothing but aids to doing what we want anyway. My parents used Christianity to help them behave decently in a difficult life. Other folk used it to justify war and property. But Duncan, what men believe isn’t important – it’s our actions which make us right or wrong. So if a God can comfort you, adopt one. He won’t hurt you.”

      This speech – or, to be accurate, the words it paraphrases – did not help me at the time, for words cannot cure a physical pain unless they are a sort of hypnotism. But when my health mended it helped me believe what I still mainly believe: that original decency is as old as original sin and essentially stronger: that those who pray are consciously strengthening wishes which (whether selfish or not) are already very strong in them, and which decide the nature of the god they invoke.

      I swear that extract contains no invention, just two bits of condensing and an exaggeration – 10 years of voluntary service are made out of what was less. It also contains an image I used in another piece of writing: the image of a small boy at family prayers who suspects he is at fault because he feels God is not with him. This became part of a play I wrote in 1964 called The Fall of Kelvin Walker. It was televised by the BBC in 1968 and published as a novel in 1985, and is a fable about a monstrously pushy young Scot getting rich quickly in London. He is buoyant with energies released by his escape from a nastily religious father who has used the god of Calvin like a rubber truncheon to batter his children into submission. Neither father nor son in that fable much resemble my father, or his father, or me, and none of the incidents in it befell any of us. When copying a thing from experiences of myself or acquaintances I sometimes gave it a context like that where it happened, sometimes did not. My most densely and deliberately autobiographical writing is in books 1 and 2 of Lanark. Apart from the encounter with the Highland minister, the encounter with the prostitute, the fit of insanity and suicide, nearly every thought and incident is copied from something real in context where it happened, but so much of my life was not copied that Lanark tells the story of a youngster estranged by a creative imagination from family, friends, teachers and city.

      I hope this is a convincing tragedy. It was not mine. My family and half my teachers did not stunt my imagination. They encouraged it Scottishly, by allowing me materials and time to paint and write, not praising me to my face but talking about the results of my work when they thought I could not hear. My family and schooling made art seem the only way to join mental adventure, physical safety and social approval. They pressed upon my bundle of traits in a way which made anything but art and writing seem dull or threatening.

      The foregoing paragraph is written to indicate both connections and divergences between life and art. The following questions were asked by Christopher Swan and Frank Delaney in August 1982 when preparing a BBC broadcast interview, and may illuminate the same subject.

      Question. What is your background?

      Answer. If background means surroundings: the first 25 years were lived in Riddrie, east Glasgow, a well maintained district of stone-fronted corporation tenements and semi-detached villas. Our neighbours were a nurse, postman, printer and tobacconist, so I was a bit of a snob. I took it for granted that Britain was mainly owned and ruled by Riddrie people – people like my father.

      If background means family: it was hardworking, well-educated and very sober. My English grandad was a Northampton foreman shoemaker who came north because the southern employers blacklisted him for trade-union activities. My Scottish grandad was an industrial blacksmith and congregational kirk-elder. In the 30s, when my father married, he worked a box-making machine in a factory, hiked and climbed mountains for a hobby, and did voluntary secretarial work for the Camping Club of Great Britain and the Scottish Youth Hostel Association. My mother was a good housewife who never grumbled, but I now know wanted more from life than it gave – my father had several ways of enjoying himself. She had very few. They were, from that point of view, a typical married couple. I had a younger sister I bullied and fought with, until we started living in separate houses. Then she became one of my best friends.

      Q. What was childhood like?

      A. Apart from the attacks of asthma and eczema, mostly painless but frequently boring. My parents’ main wish for me was that I got to university. They wanted me to get a professional job, you see, because professional people are not so likely to lose their income during a depression. To enter university I had to pass exams in Latin and mathematics which I hated. And of course there was homework. My father wanted to relieve the drudgery of learning by taking me cycling and climbing, but I hated enjoying myself in his shadow, and preferred the escapist worlds of comics and films and books: books most of all. Riddrie had a good library. I had a natural preference for all sorts of escapist crap, but when I had read all there was of that there was nothing left but the good stuff: and myth and legend, and travel, biography and history. I regarded a well-stocked public library as the pinnacle of democratic socialism. That a good dull place like Riddrie had one was proof that the world was essentially well organized.

       Q. When did you realize you were an artist?

      A. I did not realize it. Like all infants who were allowed materials to draw with, I did, and nobody suggested I stop. At school I was even encouraged to do it. And my parents (like many parents in those days) expected their children to have a party piece – a song or poem they would perform at domestic gatherings. The poems I recited were very poor A. A. Milne stuff. I found it possible to write verses which struck me as equally good, if not BETTER, because they were mine. My father typed them for me, and the puerile little stories which I sent to children’s radio competitions. When I was eleven I read a four-minute programme of my own compositions on Scottish BBC Children’s Hour. But I was eight or nine years old when it occured to me that I would write a story which would get printed in a book. This gave me a feeling of deliriously joyful power.

      Q. What sort of things did you draw when you were a child?

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