SUCCESS IS OVERRATED. The best proof of our worth is how we respond to failure. Herman Melville said that or something very like it. My marital partner still loves me, so do our children, I have recently retired with a cosy pension from a professional job which did some good and very little harm, so I have never been tested by really big failures. Yet the moments I remember with most interest are not my happiest ones, but those times when the ordinary ground under my feet seemed suddenly to sink, leaving me several yards lower than I thought normal or possible. This lower level did not prevent pleasures I had enjoyed at higher ones, but the pleasure never seemed to raise me up again. These sinkings (depressions is too mild a word for them) were never caused by irrevocable disasters, like the death of a parent. I am no masochist, but disasters on that scale stimulated and bucked me up. What let me down worst were failures of common decency, especially the first two.
My father was a businessman who died leaving just enough money for mother to send me to what was thought a very grand boarding school – the sons of many rich, well-known people went there. My immediate dislike of the place on arrival increased with time. The sons of the rich and famous were a social elite to which the teachers also belonged. Boys without much pocket money were excluded unless a brilliant appearance or talent for sport or clowning got them “taken up” by the smart majority. I belonged to a minority who were not physically bullied but usually treated as if invisible. I suppose if we had not existed the rest could not have felt so exclusive and fashionable. If we invisibles had united we would have formed a class more exclusive than the rest because smaller, but we despised ourselves too much to do that.
I had one friend among the élite, or thought I had: a senior military man’s son. He enjoyed modern American literature as much as I did. We never noticed each other when he was with his fashionable friends, but on meeting apart from them in the school library we sometimes went walks together chattering enthusiastically about books whose main characters rebelled against social codes of a type that seemed to rule our own institution. Our form of rebellion was to identify various teachers and head boys with the deranged bullies and conformists Catch-22 of Catch-22, Catcher in the Rye, Portnoy’s Complaint. Doing so often reduced us to fits of helpless laughter. Our homes in Glasgow were the only other thing we had in common. At the start of a summer holiday we exchanged addresses.
I phoned him a fortnight later and suggested we meet in town.
“I’ve a better idea,” he said, “You come over here. Come this afternoon. Pm having a kind of a party …”
He hesitated then added, “As a matter of fact it’s my birthday.”
I thanked him and asked if it would be a very smart occasion? He said, “No no no, just come the way you are.”
He lived in Pollokshields, south of the river, and I arrived with a copy of Slaughterhouse 5 in my pocket, a book I knew he would enjoy. I had never before visited a mansion standing in its own grounds. I pressed the bell and after a while the door was opened by an elderly woman in a black gown who stared at me, frowning. I said, “Is Raymond in?”
She walked away. It seemed foolish to remain on the doormat so I stepped inside, closing the door behind me. The hall had a mosaic floor, a huge clock, corridors and a broad staircase leading out between Roman-looking pillars. I stood there listening hard for sounds of a party and could hear nothing at all. A tall man with a military moustache entered and said very gently, “Yes?”
“Is Raymond in?”
He said “I’ll see about that,” and went away. A lot of time passed. The clock struck a quarter hour. I sat down on the slightly rounded top of an antique ebony chest and noticed the time pass, feeling more and more bewildered. Fifteen minutes later the tall man appeared again, stared at me, said, “Why are you still sitting there looking so miserable? Get out! We don’t want you.”
He opened the front door and I walked through it.
That was my first and worst sinking, also the end of my friendship with Raymond. I planned to studiously ignore him when our paths next crossed in the school library, but I never saw him there again.
The second sinking was a milder affair on my last day at that school. I stood with eight or nine other leavers, Raymond among them, in the Headmaster’s study, pretending to absorb a flow of the man’s brisk, facile, foreseeable, completely uninteresting platitudes. He ended with a firm, “Goodbye and good luck gentlemen. And Gilliland, stay behind for a moment.”
He shook hands with the rest who left and I remained feeling rather puzzled, because this was the first time he had ever spoken to me. He sat behind his desk, clasped his hands upon it, looked at me sternly over them for a while then said, “Don’t forget, Gilliland, that syphilis is an absolute killer. You can go now.”
So I went.
Why did he talk as if I was a sexual maniac? Why was I the only school leaver he said that to? As in all single sex schools for adolescents there had been discreet homosexual liaisons among us, but not among us in the invisible class – we were too demoralised to enjoy anything but the most solitary kind of sex. Was it possible that my slightly secretive walks with Raymond had been noticed disapprovingly by his other friends and reported to the teachers? Was our laughter over the antics of Portnoy and Yossarian overheard and interpreted as something sexually and socially dangerous? Was this reported to his father? And was keeping me behind to make that inane remark a headmaster’s ploy to avoid shaking an unpopular pupil’s hand?
I don’t know, but if so Britain is
a very queer nation.
AIBLINS
LONG AGO A COLLEGE OF further education paid me to help folk write poems, stories and other things that bring nobody a steady wage. I had applied for the job because I was in debt and needed a steady wage. The college also provided an office, desk, two chairs and flow of hopeful writers who met me one at a time. I must have talked to nearly a hundred of them while the job lasted but can now only remember:
A shy housewife writing a novel about being the mistress of a South American dictator.
An engineering lecturer writing a TV comedy about lecturers in a college of further education.
Two teenage girls, unknown to each other, who wrote passionate verses against the evils of abortion.
A dauntingly erudite medical student writing a dissertation proving, by Marxist dialectic, that Rimsky Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel was a better forecast of mankind’s political future than Wagner’s Ring.
The twelve-year-old daughter of Chinese restaurateurs who, led in by an older sister or perhaps mother or aunt, gravely handed me a sheaf of papers with a narrow column of small neat writing down the middle of each, writing that tersely described such horribly possible events that I feared they were cries for help, though of course I treated them as fiction.
And Ian Gentle.
Ian was a thin student whose manner suggested he found life a desperate but comical game he was bound to lose. He gave me a page of prose telling how raindrops slide down leaves and stems, then join between grass blades in trickles that gradually fill hollows in the ground making them pools, pools steadily enlarging until they too join and turn fields into lakes. Without emotional adverbs and adjectives, without surprising metaphors, similes or dramatic punctuation, Gentle’s ordinary words made a natural event seem rare and lovely. My new job had not yet taught me caution. I looked across the desk, waved the page of prose at him and said, “If I had written this I would strongly suspect myself of genius.”
He smiled slyly and asked, “Can I sell it?” “No. Too short. If you made it part of a story with the rest equally good Chapman might print it but Scottish magazines pay very little. Even in England the best literary magazines pay less for a story than a shop assistant’s weekly wage. But this is a beautiful description, perfect in itself. Write more of them.”
He shrugged hopelessly and said, “I can’t. You see I was inspired when I wrote that.” “What inspired you?”
“Something I heard by accident. I switched on the r
adio one night and heard this bloke, Peter Redgrove, spouting his poetry, very weird stuff. I’m not usually fond of poetry but this was different. There was a lot of water in what he recited and I’m fond of grey days with the rain falling steadily like I often saw it on my granny’s farm when I was a wee boy. I suddenly wanted to write like Peter Redgrove, not describing water behaving weirdly but water doing the sort of things I used to notice and like.”
“If a short burst of good poetry has this effect on you then expose yourself to more. There are several books of Redgrove’s poetry. Read all of them, then read MacCaig, Yeats, Frost, Carlos Williams, Auden, Hardy, Owens —”
“Why bother?”
“You might enjoy them.”
“But what would it lead to?”
“If they inspired you to write more prose of this quality … and if you persisted with your writing, and got some of it into magazines … eventually, at the age of forty, you could end up sitting behind a desk like me talking to somebody like you.”
He giggled, apologised and asked if nobody in Scotland earned a living by writing. I told him that a few writers of historical romance, crime fiction, science fiction and love stories earned the equivalent of a teacher’s income by writing a new novel every year or two.
“Thanks,” said Gentle standing up to leave, “I don’t think I’ll bother. But if it’s genius you want read Luke Aiblins’s stuff. It’s as weird as Redgrove’s.”
“Is he a student here?”
“In a way, yes, but then again, in another way, not really.”
“Tell him to show me his work.”
“I will, but he’s hard to pin down.”
In the college refectory a week or so later a sociology lecturer walked over to me looking so grimly defiant that I feared I had offended her. She placed a slim folder with a bright tartan cover on the table beside my plate and said, “Read these poems. I typed them but they’re written by Luke Aiblins, a truly remarkable student of mine.”
“I hear he’s a genius.”
“He is, but needs guidance. Can I make an appointment for him?”
We made an appointment. She said, “I think I can ensure that he keeps it though it won’t be easy. He’s very hard to pin down.”
She left. I glanced through the poems and saw they were beautifully spaced and typed. The first was titled PROEM. I read it with interest, re-read it with astonishment and a third time with pleasure. I then knew it by heart.
Bone caged, blood clagged,
nerve netted here I sit,
bee in stone honeycomb
or beast in pit or flea in bin,
pinned down, penned in,
unable to die or fly or be
any one thing but me,
a hypochondriac heart
chilled by the spittle of toads that croak
on the moon’s cryptic hemisphere.
But yet, loft-haunter, tunnel-groper,
interloper among men,
I am the Titan & my pen
wet with blue ink or black
alone can tell them what they thought
and think and give them back
the theme, scheme, dream whose head
they broke, & left for dead.
Crown, King, Divinity: all shall be mine
to take, twine, make into a masterpiece
of fine thread, strong line.
Yes, let me write my life
ten volumes in one book
of good and bad friends, women who will
and will not walk with me,
the warped, harmonious, happy, sick & dead.
While I have eyes to look, so let it be. Amen.
All his other poems were equally resounding. I was now keen to meet him and quite unable to imagine him.
He kept the appointment and was a dazzlingly beautiful boy of eighteen or nineteen. His brown eyes and head of neatly curling brown hair harmonised perfectly with brown sweater and faun slacks. Relaxation and eagerness don’t usually blend but in him they did. He entered with the happy air of someone who has all the love he wants while looking forward to more; entered silently, sat down, folded his arms and leaned toward me with an enquiring tilt of the head and encouraging smile. Beauty in people makes me want to stare with my mouth open. In men it almost strikes me as indecent, yet I felt a pang of envy that I quelled by turning my chair a little so that I looked past, not at him. As I cleared my throat to make an opening remark Aiblins said, “Excuse the question: why don’t you look straight at me?”
“I look straight at hardly anyone in case they think me rude. I suppose I’m afraid of most people but I’m not afraid of their writings. I like yours very much. You know that the rhymes of words inside a line matter as much as rhymes at the end. You know that the rhythms of lines in a verse can vary. You enjoy playing with the sounds of words and you make them entertaining for the reader.”
“Right,” said Aiblins, smiling and nodding.
“You have also learned from some very abstruse poets, Donne and Hopkins. Am I correct?”
“Eh?” said Aiblins.
“Have you read John Donne and Gerald Manley Hopkins?”
“No. Wait a minute. Yes. I once dipped into them but my work is original. I hear it inside this.”
Aiblins tapped the side of his head with a finger.
“Never mind, Leavis says inspiration is often unconscious reminiscence. Now, creative writing teachers usually, and wisely, urge young writers to use the plainest, commonest words because many of the profoundest and loveliest and funniest ideas have been put into plain words. To be or not to be, that is the question. I wish I were where Helen lies. So you despise me, Mr Gigadibs.”
“No,” said Aiblins reassuringly.
“I was quoting Browning. Now these well-meaning instructors forget that the same great wordsmiths very often relax or ascend into sonorous complexities: sharked up a list of lawless resolutes, and Eleälé to the asphaltic pool, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name, (and here I flatter you) a hypochondriac heart, chilled by the spittle of toads that croak on the moon’s cryptic hemisphere. That line of yours is absurdly pompous, grotesque, almost insane but!” (I started laughing) “It works! We are often depressed for reasons we don’t understand but feel are caused by something huge, vague and distant, something …” (I paused on the verge of saying weird, an Ian Gentle word) “ … something uncanny that might as well be on the moon.”
Aiblins, who had looked puzzled for a moment, smiled then said “Right.”
“But I want to point out that these are the first poems of a very young writer, someone who is (please excuse the simile) like a bird flapping its wings to attract attention before launching into the air. You know that because it is your only theme. You should now —”
“Excuse me,” said Aiblins quietly yet firmly. “Are these my poems?”
He lifted the folder from the desk, glanced inside then laid it back, shaking his head, smiling and saying, “Yes, my poems dressed in tartan. Women are incredible. What can you do with them? You were saying?”
“The theme of all your poems is the great poet you are going to be. It is a prologue to your life’s work, a convincing prologue, but not enough.”
“Why not?”
“Take the first poem, the best, and the first verse, also the best: Bone caged, blood clagged, nerve netted et cetera. You are describing a state of confinement and frustration everyone has sometimes felt, poets and housewives and schoolchildren and ditch diggers and college lecturers. Right?”
“Hm. Maybe,” said Aiblins.
“Verse two. Loft-haunter, tunnel-groper, interloper et cetera. Here you state your feelings of being both above and below other people, being an outsider as we called ourselves in the sixties, so you’re still talking for a lot of people, especially young ambitious ones. Right?”
“You’re getting warm.”
“Then comes I am the Titan and my pen et cetera. You now declare yourself a ma
sterful figure like Prometheus, someone who will help humanity recover something fine that it has spoiled and lost: innocence perhaps, faith, hope, love — only God knows what. So you are not now speaking for most folk, you are describing what only very confident priests, politicians, prosperous idealists, teachers, artists and writers sometimes feel, while speaking mainly for Luke Aiblins.”
Aiblins smiled and nodded.
“Now look at verse three! Crown, King, Divinity, all shall be mine. What do these three words with initial capitals mean?”
“You tell me. You are the grand panjandrum, the salaried professor, the professional critic. I’m just a humble poet. You tell me my meaning.”
“I think they mean that you feel sublimely smug because of your verbal talent.”
“Do you think all my poems convey that?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Even the love poems?”
“Did you write any? Name one.”
“OUTING.”
Opening the folder I said “Let’s hear it!” and read aloud the following.
This sunken track through the rank weeds
of docken, nettle & convolvulus
does not belong to us: only to me
whose nostrils gladly drank the stink
of vegetable sweat,
whose ears sucked in
the sullen whimper of the gnat’s wing,
who gladly felt the wet sting of
smirr upon the cheek.
So do not talk, say no word to me
but walk in stillness on a path of moss,
a slope of trees upon our right hand side
and on our right the cluck & flow
of a wide stream.
I do not know what you see here.
I do not want to know.
The Ends of Our Tethers Page 7
