Old Men in Love

by Alasdair Gray

  I felt we were talking like unusually friendly equals so said promptly, “It hardly exists. I only discovered the connection between sexual intercourse and birth a year or two ago through my affair with poor Doig.”

  “An affair? With a poor dog?” said Leni, grimacing incredulously.

  “No! Dee – oh – eye – jee, Doig, a boy I knew.”

  They wanted to hear about that so I told them. At the end both went into fits of laughter through which Ute said, “O you funny little boy!”

  It would be wrong to say I felt she had slapped my face. I felt like someone happily using a band saw that in a split second takes off his hand. Shock would at first prevent pain, he would only feel astonished that his hand was lost for ever. My shock must have shown because at once Ute apologized, but the damage had been done. I turned and walked away downhill from these climbers so never saw the summit of Ben Nevis. I am told it is a rocky plateau, a field of boulders with patches of snow in odd nooks even in the hottest summers, and on a clear day like that one I could have seen every high summit between England and the Orkneys.

  17: FURTHER EDUCATION

  After finishing in the evenings I began trying to turn my fantasies and learning into a single continuous story, always burning the results because what I wrote was obviously the work of an adolescent schoolboy. These stunted efforts still made me more of a writer than our teachers, who gave us Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thomas Hardy and only two books by Scots. Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, set in the 12th century, told how Norman conquerors and Saxon commoners are at last united as Englishmen – what a good lesson for a Scottish school child! Scott’s best novels have Scottish folk using local speech that teachers and examiners wanted us to forget. The other novel, John Buchan’s Prester John, told of a Scots minister’s son, working for the British Empire in Africa, who thwarts a black revolt planned by a black African who has fooled the white bosses by pretending to be Christian.

  Gordon MacLean left Glasgow because his dad got a job elsewhere. I did not much miss him, having now other friends who also enjoyed discussing their emotional problems with an interested listener who seemed to have none. Before Gordon left he enlarged my political views without intending to. Hugh MacDiarmid’s son, a boy of nineteen, had been jailed for refusing to do his National Service,34 because the 1707 Treaty of Union with England said no Scottish soldier could be ordered overseas against his will, and MacDiarmid’s son refused to fight for the remains of the British Empire in Kenya, Crete or Malaysia, Ulster and other places he might have been sent. Gordon and I agreed his attitude was ridiculous. We thought the Treaty of Union, having merged Scotland’s parliament with the English one, was now an obsolete document. We had no wish for Scottish self-government. Gordon believed Scottish people could not rule themselves; I agreed because Britain had achieved a Welfare State through the efforts of a parliamentary Labour Party founded by Scottish Keir Hardie. I also thought Scotland and England had equal representation in London – my general knowledge was good, but I had no head for numbers. Gordon explained that England had ten times more MPs in Westminster than Scotland, a fair arrangement (he pointed out) since England’s population had always been ten times greater. I at once saw that a minority of Scots MPs in the midst of England’s richest city must be constantly outvoted to benefit the southern kingdom. For many years this did not stop me voting Labour but from then on I began to see how the Union with England had warped Scotland’s institutions, especially schools and universities.

  At Gilmorehill our lecturers were mostly Oxford or Cambridge graduates, some of them Scots.35 They assumed ordinary students like me would stay in Scotland to teach the next generation what we had been taught, while brighter ones – their elite – would find work in England, former British colonies or the U.S.A. Bright Scots had been doing so for centuries, and bright people will want to please foreign masters by conforming to them, so the only tutor who mentioned Burns called him “a poor man’s Alexander Pope”. But they agreed that Wordsworth at his best, Blake, Byron, Shelley and Keats had not just been naytcha poets but (like Burns) had welcomed the French Revolution as the dawn of universal liberty, equality, fraternity. This enthusiasm was presented as forgivable but out of date, since Britain had now all the liberty, equality and fraternity it needed. I also learned that most great modern poets thought monetary greed had made life ugly. Ezra Pound turned Fascist because he thought only a dictator like Mussolini could make bankers fund important public works – Yeats wanted a nation where heroic landlords ruled admiring peasants – T.S. Eliot was nostalgic for the 17th century Anglican Church where peace with God came more easily – Auden was a bouncy English public-school Communist, until World War 2 converted him to something like Eliot’s Christianity. Auden also said poetry made nothing happen and our professors agreed.36

  I remember one mocking Shelley for writing that Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton had changed people’s minds more than kings, conquerors and lawgivers, therefore poets were mankind’s unacknowledged legislators. Shelley (said this professor gleefully) was an atheist, Socialist, pacifist and vegetarian, and none of his writings had persuaded anyone to become these; like other great writers Shelley had found the raw materials of art in the world around him, and what he made of them were fine poems without social consequences. I wish I had stood up and announced that Hitler, Stalin and every successful tyrant understood literature better than Auden and my professor because dictators banned and burned imaginative writing, shot or jailed poets, drove them to suicide like Mayakovsky, into exile like Brecht.37 Instead I timidly pointed out that Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had social consequences – it had been banned in Germany and France because young men, disappointed in love, had copied Werther by shooting themselves.

  “Thank you for reminding me,” he said, chuckling, “Yes, emotional foreigners are unhealthily influenced by literature, but sane people are not. Good conversation, said Dean Swift, is life’s only sure source of happiness. I agree. We who have no interest in football find our happiest topics in books and art which are, after all, civilization’s finest blossoms.”

  This thought-annihilating smugness did not silence me at first. I submitted an essay on Hamlet saying the plot was clumsily cobbled together in the hasty way Ben Jonson (a more careful playwright) deplored in Shakespeare. Hamlet is sent to England after stabbing Polonius but brought back just in time for Ophelia’s funeral by inexplicable pirates, pirates who capture his ship, let it sail on but return him to Denmark since the plot needs him there. Hamlet keeps postponing his revenge to the end of the last scene because Shakespeare, like all first class writers except Kipling, found the revenge motive too infantile to interest him, having sickened himself of it in his first and worst play Titus Andronicus. Of course all the Hamlet speeches are so entertaining that critics and audiences enjoy the play without question, accepting what happens as they accept the accidents of ordinary life. My tutor called me to his office and said, “Are you a Levisite?”

  I told him I did not know what Levisites were.

  “But you have read D.H. Lawrence’s opinion of Hamlet.”

  “No!” I told him.

  “Then where did this drivel come from?” he asked, waving the essay in my face. I said he had asked for an essay on Hamlet and I had written what I thought. He said, “You are here to learn – not think. Are you receiving a grant?”

  Like most students in those days I was receiving a grant since the 1944 Butler Acts that paid the fees of working class students would never have been passed by parliament if the middle classes had not also benefited. The bastard said, “I do not see why my taxes should be used to support a student who does not understand the purpose of a university.”

  I found this professor and others had written introductions to most of the plays and poems they examined us upon, so afterwards I pleased them by repeating their opinions without regard to the original texts. Luckily my main subjects were Latin and Greek where commenta
ry was less important than accurate translation. I did so well in them that the Snell Foundation nearly sent me to Balliol, Oxford, where my life would have become very different. But I helped a fellow student write a very funny, damaging review of Professor Fordyce’s outstandingly bad edition of Catullus.38 The review was printed anonymously in G.U.M. but Fordyce was astute enough to work out who the authors were, and had enough power in the Senate to make sure we had no chance of a high academic post in Oxford or Scotland.

  One Saturday morning I visited Renfield Street, a short street of shops in central Glasgow. It joins Sauchiehall Street, Bath Street and Argyll Street to the main bridge over the Clyde, so is always throng with pedestrians and vehicles. It is now almost incredible that second-hand books were once sold from flat-topped wheelbarrows at the corners of blocks on the western side. The spate of private cars must have swept these away in the 1960s, but in my second University year I found on one a tattered Penguin paperback of 19th century verse called Hood to Hardy. Opening it at random I found it had work by poets my teachers had never mentioned, and as I read the street noises seemed to withdraw, leaving me in a silence with these words:39

  This Beauty, this Divinity, this Thought,

  This hallowed bower and harvest of delight

  Whose roots ethereal seemed to clutch the stars,

  Whose amaranths perfumed eternity,

  Is fixed in earthly soil enriched with bones

  Of used-up workers; fattened with the blood

  Of prostitutes, the prime manure; and dressed

  With brains of madmen and the broken hearts

  Of children. Understand it, you at least

  Who toil all day and writhe and groan all night

  With roots of luxury, a cancer struck

  In every muscle; out of you it is

  Cathedrals rise and Heaven blossoms fair;

  You are the hidden putrefying source

  Of beauty and delight, of leisured hours,

  Of passionate loves and high imaginings;

  You are the dung that keeps the roses sweet

  I did not know what amaranths were or why they perfumed eternity, but that verse shook my intelligence awake by contradicting everything I had been taught about history and poetry at school and university – all I had been officially taught about life and would be taught for years to come. Since that day I have kept finding evidence that this grim view of what we call civilization is strictly true.

  I still have and love that tattered copy of the Penguin Hood to Hardy. I bought it for ninepence. The jacket indicated that the price when new had been 2/6, meaning half-a-crown, meaning 30 pence when there were 12 pence in a shilling and 240 in a pound. How queer that old money now seems! Among notes at the end of the book I read that the author had been: John Davidson [1857-1909]. Born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, son of a Dissenting Minister, Schoolmaster in Scotland until 1889 when he settled in London and published various plays and volumes of verse. He died in circumstances that suggested suicide. Barrhead is a small factory town in the Renfrew Hills six or seven miles south of Glasgow. It made lavatory pans, and I think could be reached by tram, before the trams were scrapped in 1963.

  Davidson’s verses had been written at the start of the 20th Century before two world wars, huge massacres of civilian populations, and continual government-funded escalation of wars and weaponry. I discovered him when these catastrophes had left most British people feeling safe and prosperous, but what I read for myself and have since read confirms Davidson’s tragic view of civilization. It has taken a long while for me to reach the point of asserting it here. Despite great writers working to open folks’ eyes to that truth from the days of Homer and Euripides, the teachers who expounded their work did so with eyes firmly shut. The eye-opening effort is endless. In every age it must be tackled anew, but obviously it could not be tackled within the walls of a university.

  I decided to support myself as a school teacher and had a practical and an idealistic reason for teaching in Molendinar Primary. Every pupil in that school except in the final year was my height or less. I also believed that good teachers are more important for primary schools than secondary schools, just as good teachers in secondary schools are more important than those in universities, because the earlier young folk get good schooling, the more it benefits their character. In those days nearly all students had their fees paid (like the armed forces) out of tax-payers’ money, because even Tories thought the nation needed all the well-educated citizens it could get. I was enough of a Socialist to believe that well-educated teachers from prosperous districts should carry their advantages to poorer ones. Most of my pupils were from Blackhill, a Glasgow municipal housing scheme built between the wars but less well-built than the housing schemes of Riddrie and Knightswood where clerks, schoolteachers and lower-paid professional folk were neighbours of skilled workmen. Blackhill was labelled a Slum Clearance Scheme and when high unemployment returned to Britain at the end of the sixties many Blackhill breadwinners lost their jobs and the number of crimes committed there greatly increased. My most difficult pupils came from fatherless homes. The poorest children lived with grandmothers. My first years in teaching made me very unhappy but I did some good. For several years I managed to take some of the poorest on camping holidays and twice got money from a charity that let me rent an H.F. guest house for them, Altshellach, in Arran. But like most idealistic teachers my enthusiasm dwindled so I was happy to become a Headmaster (the least responsible job in any school), happier to take early retirement and hide at last in research for my historic masterpiece.

  The flaw in most histories is authors who pretend to be unprejudiced reporters of fact but keep describing the world coming to a good end in their own comfortable state – only Carlyle saw that nations whose only guiding principle was economic competition were preparing a Dark Age blacker than earlier ones. In the 17th century Bishop Bossuet showed history culminating in Louis XIV’s Catholic France; 18th century Gibbon thought it culminated in enlightened Europe; 19th century Hegel in Protestant Prussia, Macaulay in post-Reform Bill England. The Outline of History by H. G. Wells viewed it as an irregular uphill struggle toward a world government of a scienctific, humanitarian kind – a successful 20th century League of Nations. Mark Twain shot down such daftness by pointing out that if the age of the world was represented by the height of the Eiffel Tower, the not-quite million years of human history would correspond to the thickness of the paint on a knob at the very top. He wondered if those who thought the world had been created for mankind, and more especially for themselves, might believe the Eiffel Tower was mainly built to uphold the paint on the topmost knob and concluded, “Reckon they might. I dunno.”

  If every history had a prologue describing the education of the writer’s mind, readers would know in advance why some facts dominate the narrative more than others. Dear reader you will soon see how well or badly I lay out mine. Like the Bible it starts in the only way well-educated folk now imagine the beginning.

  18: MY WORLD HISTORY: PROLOGUE

  A sudden endless gas explosion made all the material in this universe. Some parts collided with others, swirling into gassy clumps that got denser and hotter and became radiant globes as they rotated. Big neighbouring globes began turning round each other while smaller ones became satellites of a bigger partner. The lightest materials floated on the surface of the globes, sometimes cooling into floating plates of crust that grew bigger until their edges met, making a surface that only let out light where red-hot or where volcanoes exploded through. The air above this world of ours was of gases no life could breathe: methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour. The world’s crust thickened. The surface cooled until rain water could lie there without being scalded into steam. At last a sea of water covered the world except where a rocky continent, thicker than the ground under the sea, rose above it near the equator.40

  The molten minerals under the Earth’s crust had currents slowly cracking it apart, making long s
ubmarine canyons on the ocean floor with bottoms constantly restored by lava welling up through volcanic vents. Boiling water above the vents was stopped evaporating by the weight of colder water over a mile-deep above it. In the hottest depths, in a broth of dissolved chemicals, droplets started circulating. They grew larger when they touched and merged with similar droplets, but when this made them too big for their skins they split in two and went on separately. Such droplets evolved into single-celled creatures we call living because they sense things outside their bodies that can nourish them and help them reproduce, having motive power to reach for them. The evolution from these chemical drops to living cells has never (yet?) been achieved in a human laboratory. It has to happen first in deep water because in those days lethal ultra-violet sunlight penetrated water to a depth of over thirty feet. In submarine depths the sun’s rays and Earth’s heat were reduced, yet still strong enough to generate and support single-celled microbes that were the only living things for at least three quarters of life on Earth before today.

  Tiny primitive creatures fed on dissolved chemicals in the earliest sea, then bigger ones started also feeding on the smaller, breathing out carbon dioxide that rose above the sea, mixed with the atmosphere above and began screening out the lethal ultra-violet rays. This let larger living things evolve near the surface. More complex bacteria converted carbon dioxide into oxygen until the air above was two per cent oxygen, which let a kindlier sunlight shine on sea and land. Life now crossed the beaches, entering rivers, lakes, swamps, plains in the first great continent. Lichens, mosses, fungi were followed by primitive insects and those segmented worms that are ancestors of every lizard, fish, bird and mammal with a backbone. The whole upper Earth, fluid and solid, came to hold living things of every size – plankton, seaweeds, sponges, fish, squid, sharks in the oceans, – crawling things in submarine volcanic vents, rock pools and soil, – herbs, trees, amphibians, lizards on land, – spores, seeds, insects, bats, birds in the air. This living layer around our planet has been called the zoo-sphere. It is thinnest at the poles, thickest in tropical rainforests. There were many such forests on the swampy first continent.