Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

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СКАЧАТЬ Green Shutters, were it not nearly ruined by a first chapter suggesting that Gillespie’s parents were doomed to produce a monster by their weird, uncanny Scottish home. I saw that the local setting of my epic, like the supernatural part, must be shown without comment in convincing details.

      I was 44 in 1979 when this novel was completed and accepted by an Edinburgh publishing house. Two years passed before it was printed. I did not foresee that it would be a successful book but I knew that a print factory would soon be stamping paper with properly spaced type and binding it into books of 560 pages each. I imagined shelves of them in warehouses and shops, each as solid as a brick yet each containing my soul – my inner being – along with everyone and everything that had helped to make me, including (of course) every story I had enjoyed.

      This sense that my main reality would become books that would outlast my body brought peace and relaxation that were helped by a new job that, in return for a little easy, agreeable work, gave me a steady wage and an office with a view across Kelvingrove Park. I was writer in residence at Glasgow University, which meant discussing the writings of a few students who wanted my advice, but did not require me to write anything. Nor did I wish to write. I had no ideas for another story, had no intention of seeking them. I was at last free to enjoy reading for its own sake as I had done as a child. Escapist fantasy no longer interested me. I bought Ezra Pound’s complete Cantos, having gathered they were great poetry about the good and bad monetary roots of our civilisation, something we should all understand, especially since economists believe only they can do it. I also bought The Road to Xanadu by Livingston Lowes, a study of how Coleridge had come to write his great long poem and a fragment of one.

      I was not a very productive versifier, but interested in the working of creative minds.

      I found Pound’s Cantos hard going apart from the denunciation of extortionate money lending (which Marx called Capitalism) as a blight upon well-made art and building. He quoted Chinese and Renaissance scholars, founders of the USA republic and examples of Mussolini’s public work schemes in many pages, amounting, in my mind, to a formless, confusing fog. But suddenly a line from one of his Chinese Cantos spoke clear sense to me:

       Moping around the Emperor’s court, waiting for the order-to-write.

      The last three words were obviously hyphenated because they were translations of one Chinese word. This suggested a highly cultured, hierarchic empire which might train a man from infancy to be its greatest poet, and flatter him with high rank and privileges, yet prevent him from writing a word before it wants a poem to justify the government’s most appalling crime. I lifted a pen, wrote these sentences –

       Dear mother, dear father, I like the new palace. It is all squares like a chessboard. The red squares are buildings, the white squares are gardens…

      – and started inventing another new world elsewhere. Livingstone Lowes’ book had also stimulated this by showing that more exotic domains than Kubla Khan’s had gone into making Coleridge’s great poetic fragment. There was the artificial paradise in the Atlas Mountains where assassins were trained, the happy valley where Abyssinian princes were confined, a sacred Himalayan grotto and a source of the Nile. This was reviving in a middle-aged man the pleasures of childhood den-making and every lost, secret, romantic world that had once entertained him in books, comics and films. I enjoyed giving my dumb poet a luxurious apartment, garden and servants, and inventing the cruel education that qualified him for these privileges, and revealing the huge confidence trick through which the vast, exploitive empire was ruled, since the Emperor turns out to be a puppet managed by ventriloquists. I believe that, for its length, Five Letters from an Eastern Empire is my best story.

      After its publication in 1983 a producer in Scottish BBC Radio decided to broadcast it, and asked if I would like the reader to be a particular actor. I suggested Bill Paterson. “But surely he has a Scottish voice?” said the producer, who was English. I said, yes, Bill Paterson had a Scottish voice, but there were many Scottish accents, both local and general – my narrator was a high-class mandarin, and Scotland had many mandarins in its universities, and Bill Paterson could easily sound like one of them. “But your narrator is supposed to be the Poet Laureate of a great empire!” said the producer, who obviously thought it irrelevant that Britain now had none, so had the story recorded in London by an English actor. That broadcast won the approval of Rodger Scruton, a Conservative critic who thought the story a satire on Communism. A friend who later attended an international literary conference told me he had heard a Chinese and Japanese scholar discuss which of their nations my empire resembled. I told him I thought it was very much like Britain.

      Childhood Reading

      These are answers to a questionnaire sent to secondary schools, either by the Department of Education for Scotland, or else the Glasgow part of it, to find how much the pupils had read of well respected authors. The questionnaire, headed Whitehill Senior Secondary School Report on Reading may even have been devised by the teachers of English (Mr Meikle among them) who gave them out. I made this the start of an essay Robert Crawford asked me to write for a new journal, Scotlands, he was editing. The University of Edinburgh was the publisher. It later became Scottish Studies Review. First printed in 1994. The article here is a wee bit enlarged. Robert had also been Mr Meikle’s pupil when both were at Hutcheson’s, the Grammar School, as good 2ndary schools were once called.

      THE FOLLOWING REPORT on my reading was made near the end of my 16th year in September 1951, and retained by my English teacher, Mr Meikle, whose widow gave it to me after his death in the spring of 1993.

      It was written with a steel-nibbed pen dipped in a squat glass bottle (if I wrote at home) or (if I wrote at school) into an inkwell – a truncated cone of glazed white earthenware less than two inches high, whose wide end was closed by a glazed white earthenware disc, slightly more than an inch in diameter, a disc with a hole in the centre to admit the pencil and a projecting tip all round which let it hang smugly in the circular hole cut for it in our desk tops. In 1951 ball point pens had been commercially marketed for several years, but most British schools forbade their use because it would reduce the quality of our handwriting. In those days most employers still preferred clerks whose penwork was clear and elegant, so schools encouraged it. In 1951 my writing, like nowadays, was very clear but not at all elegant, having changed little since I learned to draw words when four or five. The letters are distinctly shaped and connected, but the loops of a, d, g and q are almost circular, with oval ascending loops, as are the ascending and descending loops of f, g, h, j, k and l. All ascenders and descenders are short. I could never slope the vertical strokes slightly to the right as we were urged, so my vertical strokes are exactly so, or incline as much to the left as the right.

      I am almost certain the manuscript I gave to Mr Meikle was copied out at home from an earlier, messier attempt. I was as prone then to afterthoughts as I am still, and though the spaces left for book titles after the authors names were all the same size, the titles written in are all written without a blot or correction.

      SCOTT – None.

      JANE AUSTEN – None.

      DICKENS – The Christmas Books. Barnaby Rudge. Little Dorritt. Oliver Twist. David Copperfield. The Pickwick Papers.

      THACKERAY – The Rose and The Ring.

      CHARLOTTE BRONTE – Jane Eyre.

      EMILY BRONTE – Wuthering Heights.

      GEORGE BORROW – Lavengro. Romany Rye.

      MEREDITH – СКАЧАТЬ