Poor Things

by Alasdair Gray

  POOR THINGS

  ‘By any standards, this is a marvellous, endearing book: a virtuoso feat of literary ventriloquism that projects literary voices from Hogg to George (“Flashman”) MacDonald Fraser, while preserving its author’s own dogged anarcho-socialist decency’

  New Statesman & Society

  ‘Mr. Gray contrasts the political and moral bleakness of contemporary Britain with the civic energy that characterized the best of Victorian values, now lost. He underlines the harm done to Scotland. Poor Things is a political book. It is also witty and delightfully written . . . Attention to Victorian Glasgow with its civic fountains, domestic interiors and medical schools gives the book texture. It is the characters, and strangely enough its phantasmagoria, that give it life’

  New York Times Book Review

  ‘A master of pastiche and collage in words and pictures, Gray has found a way to perfectly evoke a cracked, slightly out-of-balance sense of reality’

  Newsweek

  Dr Archibald McCandless (1862-1911) was born in Whauphill, Galloway, the illegitimate son of a prosperous tenant farmer. He studied medicine at Glasgow University, worked briefly as a house surgeon and public health officer, then devoted himself to literature and the education of his sons. His once famous epic, The Testament of Sawney Bean, has long been unfairly neglected, and his wife suppressed the first edition of his greatest work, the autobiographical Poor Things. Recently rediscovered by the Glasgow local historian, Mike Donnelly, this weird narrative is as gripping as Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and in 1992 received both the Whitbread Award and the Guardian Prize.

  Alasdair Gray, the editor, was born in Riddrie, Glasgow, 1934, the son of a cardboard-box manufacturer and part-time hill guide. He obtained a Scottish Education Department Diploma in Design and Mural Painting and is now a fat, balding, asthmatic, married pedestrian who lives by writing and designing things.

  FOR MY WIFE MORAG

  INTRODUCTION

  The doctor who wrote this account of his early experiences died in 1911, and readers who know nothing about the daringly experimental history of Scottish medicine will perhaps mistake it for a grotesque fiction. Those who examine the proofs given at the end of this introduction will not doubt that in the final week of February 1881, at 18 Park Circus, Glasgow, a surgical genius used human remains to create a twenty-five-year-old woman. The local historian Michael Donnelly disagrees with me. It was he who salvaged the text which is the biggest part of the book, so I must say how he found it.

  Life in Glasgow was very exciting during the nineteen seventies. The old industries which had made the place were being closed and moved south, while the elected governors (for reasons any political economist can explain) were buying multistorey housing blocks and a continually expanding motorway system. In the local history museum on Glasgow Green the curator Elspeth King, her helper Michael Donnelly, worked overtime to acquire and preserve evidence of local culture that was being hustled into the past. Since the First World War the City Council had given the local history museum (called the People’s Palace) no funds to buy anything new, so Elspeth and Michael’s acquisitions were almost all salvaged from buildings scheduled for demolition. A store was rented in Templeton’s carpet factory (which was soon closing down) and to this place Michael Donnelly brought troves of stained-glass windows, ceramic tiles, theatre posters, banners of disbanded trade unions and all sorts of historical documents. Elspeth King sometimes gave Michael manual help with this work, as the rest of her staff were attendants sent by the head of the city art gallery in Kelvingrove and not paid to retrieve objects from dirty, unsafe buildings. Neither, of course, were Elspeth and Michael, so the new and very successful exhibitions they put on cost the City Council little or nothing.

  While passing through the city centre one morning Michael Donnelly saw a heap of old-fashioned box files on the edge of a pavement, obviously placed there for the Cleansing Department to collect and destroy. Looking into them he found letters and documents dating from the early years of the century, the refuse of a defunct law office. A modern firm had inherited what remained of the old business, and thrown out what it did not need. The papers mainly concerned property dealings between people and families who had helped to shape the city in its earlier days, and Michael saw the name of the first woman doctor to graduate from Glasgow University, a name only known to historians of the suffragette movement nowadays, though she had once written a Fabian pamphlet on public health. Michael decided to take the files away by taxi and sift through them at leisure; but first he called on the firm which had put the boxes out and asked permission. It was denied. A senior partner (a well-known lawyer and local politician who will not be named here) told Michael that his look through the files had been a criminal act since they were not his property and intended for the municipal incinerator. He said every lawyer was sworn to keep a client’s business private, whether the lawyer inherited the business or not and whether the client lived or died. He said that the only sure way to keep old business private was to destroy proof that it had happened, and if Michael Donnelly saved any part of the heap from destruction he would be charged with robbery. So Michael left the heap as it was—except for a small item he had casually pocketed before learning this was a crime.

  It was a sealed packet inscribed with these words in faded brown ink: Estate of Victoria McCandless M.D. / For the attention of her eldest grandchild or surviving descendant after August 1974 / Not to be opened earlier. A recent hand using a modern ball-point pen had scribbled a zig-zag line through this and this underneath: No surviving descendants. The seal of the packet had been broken at one end and the paper torn open, but whoever did so had found the book and letter inside so uninteresting that they had thrust them carelessly back—both protruded and the letter was crumpled, not folded. The arch-thief Donnelly examined this closely in the People’s Palace store during a tea-break.

  The book was 7¼ by 4½ inches and bound in black cloth with a grotesque ornament stamped on the batters. On the fly-leaf someone had scribbled a sentimental verse. On the title-page this was printed: EPISODES FROM THE EARLY LIFE of a SCOTTISH PUBLIC HEALTH OFFICER / Archibald McCandless M.D. / Etchings by William Strang / GLASGOW: Published for the Author by ROBERT MACLEHOSE & COMPANY Printers to the University 1909. This was not an encouraging title. Many shallow, gossipy books were published in those days with names like Leaves from an Inspector’s Log and The Opinions and Prejudices of Frank Clark, Barrister. When the author paid the publisher for them (as here) such books were usually duller than those for which the publisher paid the author. Turning to the first chapter Michael saw a typical heading of the period:

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  My mother—my father—Glasgow University and early struggles—portrait of a professor—a financial proposal, rejected—my first microscope—an equal intelligence.

  What most interested Michael Donnelly were the Strang illustrations, all portraits. William Strang (1859–1921) was a Scottish artist born in Dumbarton, who studied under Legros at the Slade School of Art, London. He is known nowadays for his engravings rather than paintings, and some of his best work went into book illustration. A doctor who could pay Strang to etch pictures for a privately printed book must have had a larger income than most public health officers, yet the Archibald McCandless whose face was on the frontispiece had not the look of a rich man or a doctor. The accompanying letter was even more perplexing. It was from Victoria McCandless M.D., widow of the author, telling the descendant who never existed that the book was full of lies. Here is part of it:

  By 1974 . . . surviving members of the McCandless dynasty will have two grandfathers or four great-grandfathers, and will easily laugh at the aberration of one. I cannot laugh at this book. I shudder
at it and thank the Life Force that my late husband had just this single copy printed and bound. I have burned . . . the original manuscript and would have burned this too, as he suggests . . . but alas! it is almost the only evidence left that the poor fool existed. He also paid a small fortune for it. . . . I do not care what posterity thinks of it, as long as nobody now living connects it with me.

  Michael saw that both book and letter might repay closer attention, so put them with other material to be concentrated on when he had time.

  And there they lay. That afternoon he learned that Glasgow University’s old theological college was being cleared out for renovation by a firm of property developers. (It is now luxury flats.) Michael found it contained over a dozen large framed oil paintings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scots clergy, and these too would have burned in the municipal incinerator at Dawsholm Park if he had not cut them from their stretchers (they had been screwed to the wall at a prominent height) and taken them to the municipal art gallery in Kelvingrove, where space was found for them in the over-crowded store. Over a decade passed before Michael Donnelly had time to sit down and investigate social history in a leisurely way. He left the People’s Palace in 1990 when Glasgow had been declared the official Culture Capital of Europe by Margaret Thatcher’s Minister of Arts, and on the way out pocketed again the book and letter which (he was sure) would mean nothing at all to whoever replaced him—if anyone did.

  I first met Michael Donnelly in 1977 when Elspeth King had employed me in the People’s Palace as an artist-recorder, but when he contacted me in the autumn of 1990 I had become a self-employed writer who dealt with several publishers. He lent me this book, saying he thought it a lost masterpiece which ought to be printed. I agreed with him, and said I would arrange it if he gave me complete control of the editing. He agreed, a little reluctantly, when I promised to make no changes to Archibald McCandless’s actual text. Indeed, the main part of this book is as near to a facsimile of the McCandless original as possible, with the Strang etchings and other illustrative devices reproduced photographically. However, I have replaced the lengthy chapter headings with snappier titles of my own. Chapter 3, originally headed: Sir Colin’s discovery—arresting a life—“What use is it?”—the queer rabbits—“How did you do it?”—useless cleverness and what the Greeks knew—“Good-bye”—Baxter’s bulldog—a horrible hand: is now simply called “The Quarrel”. I have also insisted on renaming the whole book POOR THINGS. Things are often mentioned in the story and every single character (apart from Mrs. Dinwiddie and two of the General’s parasites) is called poor or call themselves that sometime or other. I print the letter by the lady who calls herself “Victoria” McCandless as an epilogue to the book. Michael would prefer it as an introduction, but if read before the main text it will prejudice readers against that. If read afterward we easily see it is the letter of a disturbed woman who wants to hide the truth about her start in life. Furthermore, no book needs two introductions and I am writing this one.

  I fear Michael Donnelly and I disagree about this book. He thinks it a blackly humorous fiction into which some real experiences and historical facts have been cunningly woven, a book like Scott’s Old Mortality and Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. I think it like Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson; a loving portrait of an astonishingly good, stout, intelligent, eccentric man recorded by a friend with a memory for dialogue. Like Boswell, the self-effacing McCandless makes his narrative a host to letters by others who show his subject from a different angle, and ends by revealing a whole society. I also told Donnelly that I had written enough fiction to know history when I read it. He said he had written enough history to recognize fiction. To this there was only one reply—I had to become a historian.

  I did so. I am one. After six months of research among the archives of Glasgow University, the Mitchell Library’s Old Glasgow Room, the Scottish National Library, Register House in Edinburgh, Somerset House in London and the National Newspaper Archive of the British Library at Colindale I have collected enough material evidence to prove the McCandless story a complete tissue of facts. I give some of this evidence at the end of the book but most of it here and now. Readers who want nothing but a good story plainly told should go at once to the main part of the book. Professional doubters may enjoy it more after first scanning this table of events.

  29 AUGUST, 1879: Archibald McCandless enrols as a medical student in Glasgow University, where Godwin Baxter (son of the famous surgeon and himself a practising surgeon) is an assistant in the anatomy department.

  18 FEBRUARY, 1881: The body of a pregnant woman is recovered from the Clyde. The police surgeon, Godwin Baxter (whose home is 18 Park Circus) certifies death by drowning, and describes her as “about 25 years old, 5 feet 10¾ inches tall, dark brown curling hair, blue eyes, fair complexion and hands unused to rough work; well dressed.” The body is advertised but not claimed.

  29 JUNE, 1882: At sunset an extraordinary noise was heard throughout most of the Clyde basin, and though widely discussed in the local press during the following fortnight, no satisfactory explanation was ever found for it.

  13 DECEMBER, 1883: Duncan Wedderburn, solicitor, normally resident in his mother’s home at 41 Aytoun Street, Pollokshields, is committed to the Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum as incurably insane. Here follows a report from The Glasgow Herald, two days later: “Last Saturday afternoon members of the public complained to the police that one of the orators in the open forum on Glasgow Green was using indecent language. The constable investigating found the speaker, a respectably dressed man in his late twenties, was making slanderous statements about a respected and philanthropic member of the Glasgow medical profession, mingling them with obscenities and quotations from the Bible. When warned to desist the orator redoubled his obscenities and was taken with great difficulty to Albion Street police office, where a doctor pronounced him fit to be detained, but not to plead. Our correspondent tells us he is a civil lawyer of good family. No charges are being pressed.”

  27 DECEMBER, 1883: General Sir Aubrey de la Pole Blessington, once nicknamed “Thunderbolt” Blessington but now Liberal M.P. for Manchester North, dies by his own hand in the gun-room of Hogsnorton, his country house at Loamshire Downs. Neither obituaries nor accounts of the funeral mention his widow, though he had married twenty-four-year-old Victoria Hattersley three years earlier, and neither her legal separation from him nor her death were ever recorded.

  10 JANUARY, 1884: By special licence a civil marriage contract is signed between Archibald McCandless, house doctor in Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and Bella Baxter, spinster, of the Barony Parish. The witnesses are Godwin Baxter, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and Ishbel Dinwiddie, housekeeper. The bride, the groom and both witnesses are all residents of 18 Park Circus, where the marriage takes place.

  16 APRIL 1884: Godwin Baxter dies at 18 Park Circus of what Archibald McCandless M.D. (who signs the death certificate) describes as “a cerebral and cardiac seizure provoked by hereditary neural, respiratory and alimentary dysfunction”. The Glasgow Herald, reporting on the burial service in the Necropolis, mentions “the uniquely shaped coffin”, and that the deceased has left his entire estate to Dr. and Mrs. McCandless.

  2 SEPTEMBER, 1886: The woman who married Archibald McCandless M.D. under the name Bella Baxter, enrols in the Sophia Jex-Blake School of Medicine for Women under the name Victoria McCandless.

  Michael Donnelly has told me he would find the above evidence more convincing if I had obtained official copies of the marriage and death certificates and photocopies of the newspaper reports, but if my readers trust me I do not care what an “expert” thinks. Mr. Donnelly is no longer as friendly as formerly. He blames me for the loss of the original volume, which is unfair. I would gladly have sent a photocopy to the publisher and returned the original, but that would have added at least £300 to the production costs. Modern typesetters can “scan” a book into their machine from a typed page, but from a photocopy mu
st type it in all over again; moreover the book was needed by a photographic specialist, to make plates from which the Strang etchings and facsimiles of Bella’s letter could be reproduced. Somewhere between editor, publisher, typesetter and photographer the unique first edition was mislaid. These mistakes are continually happening in book production, and nobody regrets them more than I do.

  I will end this introduction with a brief contents list in which the slightly edited reprint of the McCandless volume is given pride of place.

  INTRODUCTION

  by Alasdair Gray

  Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer

  by Archibald McCandless M.D.

  A letter about the book to a grand- or great-grandchild

  by “Victoria” McCandless M.D.

  CHAPTER NOTES, HISTORICAL AND CRITICAL

  by Alasdair Gray

  I have illustrated the chapter notes with some nineteenth-century engravings, but it was McCandless who filled spaces in his book with illustrations from the first edition of Gray’s Anatomy: probably because he and his friend Baxter learned the kindly art of healing from it. The grotesque design opposite is by Strang, and was stamped in silver upon the batters of the original volume.

  TO SHE WHO MAKES MY LIFE WORTH LIVING

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1: MAKING ME

  2: MAKING GODWIN BAXTER

  3: THE QUARREL

  4: A FASCINATING STRANGER

  5: MAKING BELLA BAXTER

  6: BAXTER’S DREAM

  7: BY THE FOUNTAIN

  8: THE ENGAGEMENT

  9: AT THE WINDOW

  10: WITHOUT BELLA