Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

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СКАЧАТЬ Space ships, monsters, maps of imaginary planets and kingdoms, the settings for stories of romantic and violent adventure, which I told my sister when we walked to school together. She was the first audience I could really depend on in the crucial years between seven and eleven.

      Q. How did your parents react to your wish to become a professional artist.

      A. They were alarmed. They wanted art to enrich my life in the spare time left over from earning a wage, but they thought, quite correctly, that living to make it would bring me to dole-queues, and wearing secondhand clothes, and borrowing money, and having my electricity cut off – bring me to the state many respectable working folk are forced into during depressions, for reasons they cannot help. That I should choose to become a seedy parasite in order to make obscure luxury items hardly anybody wanted worried them, as it would worry me if my son took that course. So till a few years ago I was embarrassed when I had to tell people my profession. But that feeling of shame stopped last year when I earned enough to pay taxes, so it was not important.

      Q. Is it possible that your concentration on Scottish subject matter will make Lanark inaccessible to the non-Scottish?

      A. You would not be interviewing me if my book was only accessible to Scots. And all imaginative workers make art out of the people and places they know best. No good writer is afraid to use local place names – the bible is full of them. No good writer is afraid to use local politics – Dante peoples Hell, Purgatory and Heaven with local politicians. I don’t think Scotland a better country, Glasgow a better city than any other, but all I know of Hell and Heaven was learned here, so this is the ground I use, though sometimes I disguise the fact – just as Dean Swift pretended to describe an island people by pygmies, when describing England.

      Q. What made you write 1982 Janine?

      A. A wish to show a sort of man everyone recognizes and most can respect: not an artist, not an egoist, not even a radical: a highly skilled workman and technician, dependable, honest and conservative, who should be one of the kings of his age but does not know it, because he has been trained to do what he is told. So he is a plague and pest to himself, and is going mad, quietly, inside.

      Q. What are the main themes of your painting?

      A. The Garden of Eden and the triumph of death. All my pictures use one or other or both. This is nothing abnormal. Any good portrait shows someone at a point in the journey from the happy garden to the triumph of death. I don’t regard these states as far-fetched fantasies. Any calm place where folk are enjoying each other’s company is heavenly. Any place where crowds struggle with each other in a state of dread is a hell, or on the doorstep of hell.

      Q. How important to you is religion as a theme?

      A. Religion is not a theme, religion – any religion – is a way of seeing the world, a way of linking the near, the ordinary, the temporary with the remote, the fantastic, the eternal. Religion is a perspective device so I use it, of course. I differ from the church people in seeing heaven and hell as the material of life itself, not of an afterlife. Intellectually I prefer the Olympian Greek faith. Emotionally I am dominated by the Old Testament. Morally speaking I prefer Jesus, but he sets a standard I’m too selfish to aim for. I’m more comfortable with his daddy, Jehovah, who is nastier but more human. The world is full of wee Jehovahs.

      1. A gird was a thin metal hoop, at least waist-high to the child racing it but the bigger the better. The cleek was a short iron rod ending in a hook or ring, used by the racer as a handle to drive the hoop. The pleasure of this was the pleasure of running as fast as a wheel running beside you, a wheel which depended on your skill in turning corners, dodging obstacles and leaping over holes without you and gird losing speed or falling.

      2. A dunny is the ground floor exit from a close into a tenement back yard or green, which was usually some steps down lower than the close mouth or entrance from the paved street.

      3. Milton and Cromwell were of this sect, and during the Protectorate it nearly became the legally Established Church of England and Scotland. It resembled the Scottish Presbyterian Church in rejecting Episcopalian bishops, liturgy and ornament, but differed from it after 1688 by insisting that the congregation of each church should elect its ministers, so has never been supported by the revenues of the state.

      4. Remember Alexander Gray is writing in 1971.

      5. A walk of at least seventeen miles or 27.3 kilometers.

      6. In 20th Century’s first half Beardmore & Co. was the largest engineering firm in Britain, building parts of Merchant and Royal Navy warships, locomotive engines, motor cars and aircraft, including the first airship to make a double-crossing of the Atlantic. (See Keay’s Collin’s Encyclopeadia of Scotland.)

      7. This was a trip by paddle steamer from Broomielaw, at the centre of Glasgow, to one of the many resorts on the Firth of Clyde and its islands, the trippers usually returning the same day.

      8. This is an error. Edward VII was crowned in 1902 when Alec Gray was five. He is remembering the coronation of George V in 1911 when my Dad was thirteen.

      9. A pend is an passageway into a lane through the ground floor of a tenement, usually with upstairs flats above it entered from the communal close.

      Another Not Scotland

      The Edinburgh Book Festival Ltd (International, of course) hired me to write this for publication by Cargo Publishing 2012 in a boxed set of four slim hardcover books with the titles Here and There, Somewhere and Everywhere. The set was named Elsewhere. The writers, asked “to explore what it meant to them to be elsewhere,” came up with prose grouped (said said the blurb) so that “Here were stories of home, There was travel and exploration, Somewhere a land of magic and imagination and Everywhere was what young adults find elsewhere.” My piece was 6th in Here. This essay spans more of my life that any other, showing how the more I have aged, the more interesting remote past has become to me. It does. Yes indeed.

      NOBODY IS MORE LIKE GOD than a baby. Babies live in eternity, a present tense without past, future and thought. When hungry or in pain their whole universe starves and is wholly evil until it supplies what they need, failing which they abolish it by dying. When fed, comfortable, awake they are fascinated by sensations, smells, tastes, noises, lights, colours – everything perceivable. Slowly they start noticing bodies besides theirs.

      As a baby I was taken out in a pram by my mother’s sister, Aunt Annie, through Riddrie Knowes near my home. Knowes is a Scots word for hills, which for years I thought meant trees, because though she pushed me uphill to reach it, we then went along an unpaved road between high elm and beech trees. Years later she told me that one day a dead crow fell into the pram from an overhead branch, perhaps struck dead by heart failure. This unexpected corpse did not hurt me, but she said that when we passed under that tree on later perambulations I looked up as if expecting another bird to fall from it. This showed I was starting to associate ideas, as Hobbes, Locke and Hume called the process. Pavlov later proved it anatomically by opening dogs’ cheeks to show they salivate on hearing dinner bells. More experience of that tree must have taught me that it was СКАЧАТЬ