Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

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      Before my son could walk or talk I saw that happening in his face when he was fed his first spoonful of ice cream. First a brief frown – What is this? – then a look of shock – It freezes! Hurts! His face tensed, mouth opened as he drew a deep breath to bellow out his rage, but before that cry emerged he suddenly stopped – his mouth was thawing the freezing cream, the pain of his cold palate roof was giving way to lovely new sweetness on his tongue. He swallowed, licked his lips, opened his mouth for more. The second spoonful made the first range of expressions happen again, but faster. When the last of the ice cream was eaten he was welcoming the coldness as an introduction to something better. Thus we learn to think, while discovering we are not God, but a body in times and places others share.

      Wordsworth is surely right to say that the younger we are the more wonderful appear realities like rainbows, sunlight, storms, flowers, mountains etcetera. So what also arouses our early appetite for tales of magic gifts, impossible monsters, fantastic kingdoms? I seem to remember that no sooner was home a familiar place to me than I wanted stories to take me elsewhere, to extravagantly different places. Two or three centuries ago some authors decided that fairy tales were invented by superstitious nursemaids who used them to fill the minds of respectable people’s children with nonsense. They wrote stories for children about children, tales about children who told lies and were disobedient so came to really bad ends, good children who sometimes suffered unfairly but were at last rewarded or else died and went to Heaven.

      Two very different poets hated such tales – Sam Johnson, a very sensible Christian, and Sam Coleridge, an intensely intellectual scatterbrained Romantic. They agreed that young children needed tales of giants and magical wonders – “to stretch their little minds” said Johnson. The reason was obvious long before Alfred Adler advertized his inferiority complex. Infants live in a world of giants because even children a year or two older tower over them. They can hardly ever redress unfair treatment so like imagining help from fairy godmothers, an Aladdin’s lamp, a Wizard of Oz. As a child in the 1930s and 40s I gloried in such stories and the Disney movies based on them, which were also wise enough to contain believable nightmares – the wicked witch’s gloating mockery of the skeletal prisoner dead from thirst, Dumbo Jumbo’s mother chained as a mad elephant when she revolts against her child being made a clown, Pinocchio growing donkey ears and tail after joining an orgy of vandalism. My appetite for fantasy was healthily abated between the years of eight and ten when I lived beside a Yorkshire market town.

      Our home was a bungalow at the side of a rural lane. On the other side was, a neglected field with trees and clumps of bushes, also an overgrown garden with an old draw-well smothered in ivy. I don’t recall even a ruined house nearby. Here with one or two school friends I made dens – secret places inside bushes or up trees which we wanted nobody else to see or know about. Much healthy open-air business was enjoyed searching for and making these as we explored the banks of the river Wharf, or cycled on country roads to places like the Jackdaw Crags beyond the town, looking for new ones. I recall nothing wild or remarkable done in these dens, not even stories we told each other there. Then in 1944 our family returned to Riddrie, the housing scheme in North-East Glasgow where I was born, and been as happy as most well-treated children, but which now felt like confinement. Secret dens could not be built in our back green or the adjacent public park. The banks of the nearby Monkland Canal would have done, being sufficiently wild, but were forbidden to me as dangerous. Other boys played outdoors by kicking balls about. I didn’t enjoy that. Fantastic fiction became my obsession. I visited Riddrie Public Library four or five times a week, never taking much more than a day to read a whole book.

      The genre I preferred began with someone who seemed like me in a commonplace world, who found an exit into a wonderland, a place of exciting adventure. The earliest classics of this genre were Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and I had heard others dramatised on the BBC’s Children’s Hour – The Magic Bedknob, The Wind in the Willows, The Box of Delights. A sub-division of this had children who found lost or hidden lands. Prodigiously productive Enid Blyton wrote a shelf of books about these – The Valley of Adventure, Sea of Adventure, Island of Adventure, and others. In adolescence, I enjoyed similar books written for immature adults – Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Rider Haggard’s She, The Return of She and Allan Quartermain. There were films about them – King Kong and Lost Horizon. In a BBC radio dramatisation I heard H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and at once ordered through Glasgow Public Libraries all his early romances, which I still think are science fiction’s unsurpassable best. His The First Men on the Moon shows an impossible adjacent planet, yet imagined in gloriously convincing detail that also makes it excellent social criticism. That novel, his The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds describe exotic worlds elsewhere, but are no more escapist fiction than Gulliver’s Travels and Orwell’s 1984.

      Before leaving secondary school I decided to write a book about a fantastic world of my own invention that would also grotesquely satirise the world I knew. In planning this I was inspired by Kafka’s The Trial, translated by Edwin and Willa Muir, and also by their foreword saying that Kafka’s protagonist, like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim, was seeking salvation in a world where neither Heaven nor Hell are clearly signposted. This novel in which a bureaucracy uses a rented bedroom, the attic of a slum tenement, a pub’s bar room and a cathedral outside service time to entangle a man could be happening in Glasgow, and the bureaucrats were more humane and believable than Orwell’s Thought Police. Kafka’s junior bank manager was so ruthlessly selfish that I never doubted his guilt. And now I was also reading books about the growing pains of young men in worlds nearer my own in time and space – David Copperfield, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sons and Lovers. I realised that books which, as Milton says, the world would not willingly let die must present real local experiences such as those Dickens, Joyce and D.H. Lawrence suffered, even if they were combined with strange Heavens, Hells and magic wonderlands elsewhere. Many books in the Bible did that, and most folk tales, the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and poems I loved and knew by heart, especially the Scottish Border Ballads. In a public library (Denistoun, not Riddrie) I found Tillyard’s The English Epic and its Background which, after briefly surveying the great epic poems and histories of Greece, Rome, Italy and Portugal, concluded that since Milton’s time, great epics were likely to be in prose, and mentioned Walter Scott’s most Scottish novels as almost (though not quite) amounting to a national epic. So I set out to write an epic, and a Scottish one.

      Like many Scots children’s primary and secondary schooling, mine had said nothing about Scottish culture. Until the 1970s our state schools had generally a broader and higher standard than their English equivalents, but aimed to qualify the smartest pupils for high positions in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Canada, Australia and elsewhere, so in Scotland English literature was taught as if no Scot had contributed to it, though some Irish and American authors were named. We had heard of Robert Burns because most of our parents knew some of his poems and many were sung on the BBC Scottish Home Service, but R.L. Stevenson was dismissed as a writer for very young children and the only Walter Scott novel given to us was Ivanhoe. This tells how the Normans in England became acceptable to Saxons they had conquered – a fine lesson for Scottish children! For most of the 20th century the poet Hugh MacDiarmid was treated as a pest by Scottish politicians and ignored as a poet by British academics, though his work and critical writing had won the attention of French and American professors of literature. In 1958, Hogg’s The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner, with a preface by Andre Gide, came to Glasgow Public Libraries and me, proving that a Scottish tradition of combining local and supernatural events existed in prose as well as poetry. But to work well in a book, the Scottishness of Scottish characters must be taken for granted. Dostoyevsky slightly spoils some great novels with sentences about Russian-ness. Gillespie by MacDougall Hay is a nearly great novel about a dull but cunning, mean, greedy grocer becoming wealthy in a Highland fishing village, blighting lives around him as he does so. This account of late 19th century capitalism at work through interesting people in a small town would be almost as good as Hardy’s The СКАЧАТЬ