Lanark

by Alasdair Gray

  Two days later a telegram was handed to him which said, RETURN TO ART SCHOOL AT ONCE. DIPLOMA EXAM STARTED YESTERDAY. PETER WATT. The art school looked flimsier than ever and as he entered the old studio the other students gave an ironical cheer. Mr. Watt muttered, “Better late than never, Thaw,” and handed him a paper which required him to design a decorative panel for the dining room of a luxury liner. He took a sheet of hardboard and spent the morning filling it with a merman and a mermaid chasing each other’s tails with a knife and fork, then he said, “That’s the best I can do, Mr. Watt. I’ll go back to the church now.”

  “Wait a minute! You’re allowed six weeks for this examination. Half the diploma assessment is based on it.”

  “I know, sir. I’m sorry, but I must return to Cowlairs. You see—”

  “You will not return to Cowlairs. You will come with me, now, to the registrar.”

  Thaw was left outside the office door for ten or fifteen minutes and ushered in by the registrar’s secretary, an unusual formality. Mr. Peel and Mr. Watt were seated on the same side of a long table, a single chair facing them at a distance. Thaw sat on it and some seconds of tribunal silence ensued. The two men looked so solidly forbidding that he instinctively blurred them by unfocusing his eyes. At last the registrar said, “Have you any complaint about your treatment in this school, Thaw?”

  “None. I have been treated very well.”

  “Correct. Yet you have ignored our advice, flouted our authority and not only obliged us to bend our rules but actually to improvise new ones to avoid expelling you. Of course we have been influenced by consideration of your health: and I don’t mean merely your physical health.”

  There was more silence, so Thaw said, “Thank you, sir.”

  “When you started here you signed an application form. That form was a contract, a contract you have renewed at the start of each school year. Society is upheld by contracts, Thaw. All government, all business, all industry is the result of people making promises and working to keep them. In return for a steady grant of money you promised to qualify for the Scottish Education Department Diploma of Painting. This school exists to award that diploma. Mr. Watt tells me you refuse to sit the examination.”

  “But I’ve finished it.”

  Mr. Watt said, “What will the other students think of the exam if you are allowed to pass on half a day’s work?”

  Thaw said, “Mr. Watt, I realize that schools need examinations, and admit that many students wouldn’t work at all if they weren’t rewarded with paper rolls printed by the government. And, Mr. Peel, I’ve been thrilled to hear you defending contracts and promises, because if these weren’t defended we’d have mere anarchy. I cannot deny your truths, I can only oppose them with mine. This exam is endangering an important painting. It would be blasphemy to waste my talent making frivolous decorations for a non-existent liner. But I see your difficulty. You must uphold the art school, while I am upholding art. The solution is simple. Don’t award me this diploma. I promise not to feel offended. The diploma is useless, except to folk who want to be teachers.”

  Thaw leaned forward to see the pleased light of agreement on the registrar’s face, but it was so compressed and wrinkled that he sank back feeling lonely. The registrar said, “I have never in my life heard such a display of intellectual arrogance. You’ve made me more miserable than I’ve felt for many years. You have sat smugly declaiming that black is white and evidently expecting me to agree. I have no advice to give, but I tell you this: If you do not return at once to the examination your connection with the art school ends today, and for good.” Thaw nodded and left the office feeling dazed. He went upstairs to the studio trying to think of entertaining nonsense to add to the background of the examination panel. He climbed slower and slower, then stopped and turned. On the way down he passed Mr. Watt coming up. They pretended not to see each other.

  The following evening his father entered the church and cried, “Come down and read this, Duncan!”

  Thaw wiped his brush and descended the ladder.

  “Read this!” commanded Mr. Thaw, stiffly holding out a letter.

  “No need.”

  “Damn you, read it!”

  “No. It’s from Mr. Peel explaining why I’ve been expelled.”

  “My God, you’ve made a mess of your life.”

  “It’s too early to judge.”

  “How do you intend to eat in future?”

  “I’ve still some of my grant money. And the minister says the congregation may hold a collection for me when the mural’s done.”

  “What will that bring you? Twenty pounds? Fourteen? Eight?”

  “There’s going to be a lot of good publicity, Dad. I may get other mural jobs, paying ones, in cafés and pubs. The ceiling’s finished. What do you think of it?”

  “I don’t appreciate painting, Duncan! I take my opinion from the experts. And you’ve quarrelled with your experts.”

  “The experts who matter are you and me, the only people here. Please look at my ceiling! Don’t you enjoy it? Look at the hedgehog! I copied her from a cigarette card you stuck in an album for me when I was five. Don’t you remember? Will’s Wild Animals of Britain? She fits that corner perfectly. Don’t you like her?”

  Mr. Thaw sat on a corner of the communion table and said, “Son, when will I be footloose?”

  Thaw was puzzled by the word. He said, “Footloose?”

  “Yes. When can I live as I want? I don’t enjoy working as a costing clerk in a city. This summer I meant to get a job with the Scottish Youth Hostels or the Camping Club. The money’s poor but I’d be among hills and able to walk and climb and mix with the sort of folk I like. I’m nearly sixty, but thank God I have my health. I expected you to get a job at the art school. Peel told me it was a probability four years ago. Instead you’ve chosen to become a social cripple. Not like Ruth! She’s independent.”

  “I’m independent too. If I’ve recently eaten your food or slept under your roof it’s because I was sick,” said Thaw sullenly. He was disconcerted, for he had never expected his father to become a man who lived by doing what he liked. Mr. Thaw said mildly, “Son, I don’t hate helping you. Listen, I’m prepared to pay the rent of the house for at least another year, even if I’m not living there. We can both use it as a base, a point of departure. Of course, I’d prefer you to pay for the electricity you burn.”

  “That’s fair enough.”

  “Another thing. Since you were wee I’ve put a few bob a month into a couple of insurance policies for you. It’s time you did that yourself. Keep up the payments, and you’ll get five pounds a week from the time you’re sixty. Of course, if you realize it right away you’ll get less than fifty pounds. That’s up to you.”

  “Thank you, Dad,” said Thaw and nearly smiled. He had not lied in saying he still had some grant money left, but it was only a few shillings.

  A week later a group containing Mr. Smail and the minister entered. Mr. Smail said jovially, “Here’s a young lady who wants to speak to you, Duncan.”

  Thaw came down from the ladder. The lady was dwarfed by a tall man with an expensive camera. The details of her person and dress were slightly sloppy, but she moved with such smiling confidence that this wasn’t seen at first. She held out her hand, saying, “Peggy Byres of the Evening News.”

  Thaw laughed and said, “Are you going to make me famous?” He talked for six or seven minutes about the ceiling. She glanced at it, scribbled in a note pad and said, “Is your family very religious, Duncan?”

  “Oh, no. I’ve never been christened.”

  “Then why are you so religious?”

  “I’m not. I never go to church services. Sunday is my day of rest.”

  “Then what makes you paint a religious work without payment?”

  “Ambition. The Old Testament has everything that can be painted in it: universal landscapes and characters and dreams and adventures and histories. The New Testament is more single-minded. I don’t e
njoy it so much.”

  “Look at these rabbits beside the pool, Miss Byres,” said Mr. Smail. “You can almost hear them nibbling.”

  The reporter looked at the Eden wall and said, “Who’s that behind the bramble bush with a lizard at his feet?”

  “God,” said Thaw, glancing uneasily at the minister and Mr. Smail. “The lizard is the serpent before his legs were removed. God has his back to us—you can hardly see his face.”

  “But what we can see looks very … looks rather …”

  “Enigmatic,” said Thaw. “He’s not just watching Adam and Eve make love, he can see the expulsion afterward and the river of bloody history down to the wars of the apocalypse. We’ve had a lot of these wars recently. He can even see past them to the just city predicted by St. John, Dante and Marx. I haven’t read Marx but—”

  “These birds in the tree of life are miracles of delicacy, aren’t they, Miss Byres?” said Mr. Smail from a distance.

  “But why is Adam a Negro?”

  “He’s actually more red than black,” the minister murmured, “and the name ‘Adam’ derives from a Hebrew word meaning ‘red earth.’”

  “But Eve is white!”

  “Pearly pink,” said Thaw. “I’m told that for a few moments love makes different people feel like one. My outline shows the oneness, my colours emphasize the difference. It’s an old trick. Rubens used it.”

  “Did you draw Eve from a model?”

  “Yes.”

  “A girlfriend?” asked the reporter, with an arch smile.

  “No, a friend of a friend,” said Thaw, who had drawn Janet Weir. He added glumly, “Most girls will pose naked for an artist if he only wants to draw them.”

  The reporter tapped her lip with the pencil, then said, “Do you find life a tragedy or really more of a joke?”

  Thaw laughed and said, “That depends on the part of it I’m looking at.”

  “And what will you do when you’ve finished here?”

  “I hope to paint some commercial murals. I’ll need the money.”

  “Do you like the mural, Miss Byres?” said Mr. Smail.

  “I’m afraid I’m not an art critic. The Evening News doesn’t have a regular art critic. Duncan, would you go up your ladder and pretend to paint Adam and Eve for a minute? We’ll take a photograph, anyway.”

  He bought the paper on Saturday and carried it eagerly into the pulpit. The article began:

  ATHEIST PAINTS FACE OF GOD

  Most people think artists are mad. The wild-bearded figure in the paint-stained dressing gown who haunts Cowlairs Parish Church will hardly reassure them on that point. And Duncan Thaw, a self-proclaimed atheist and Marxist, freely admits he is painting a large mural there with nothing in mind but the lust for fame.

  His eyes clenched shut in horror. Eventually he opened them and skimmed quickly through the rest.

  He has a terrifying laugh, like the bark of an asthmatic sea lion, and produces it unexpectedly for no reason at all. I sometimes wondered if it was caused by something I had said, but on reflection I saw this was impossible….

  Was Adam a Negro? Duncan Thaw thinks so….

  “I have no trouble finding nude models,” he remarks, with something suspiciously like a wink….

  He hopes this will be the first of many murals. He hopes to make a lot of money this way. He says he needs it.

  He felt as if there was poison in his chest, as if half his blood had been removed. He sat still until the old minister wandered in and asked, “Have you read … ?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s unfortunate. Unfortunate.”

  “Surely she was trying to be cruel!”

  “No, I don’t think so. I met many reporters when I was chaplain at Barlinnie Jail and on average they’re no more wicked than other people. But their job depends on being entertaining, so they make everything look as clownish or as monstrous as they can. If any more reporters come, Duncan, my advice is to tell them nothing you really feel or believe.”

  A reporter came that evening, took Thaw for a drink in a pub and explained that he too would have been an artist if his uncle hadn’t opposed the idea. Thaw said, “Please tell your readers I am not an atheist. I may have my own conception of God, but it doesn’t clash with the opinions of the church, my employer.”

  This appeared two days later under the heading:

  NOT AN ATHEIST

  The Cowlairs “mad muralist,” Duncan Thaw, has denied he is an atheist. He says he has his own conception of good but it doesn’t clash.

  After this Thaw noticed that journalists weren’t interested in his thoughts, though they asked him what it felt like to sleep alone in a big building and kept photographing Adam and Eve. An exception was a tall man in a beautifully cut grey suit from the Glasgow Herald. He sat for half an hour in the front pew staring at the ceiling, then sat on the organ stool and gazed at the Eden wall. At last he said, “I like this.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Of course it will be almost impossible for me to criticize it. It isn’t cubist or expressionist or surrealist, it isn’t academic or kitchen sink or even naive. It’s a bit like Puvis de Chavannes, but who nowadays knows Puvis de Chavannes? I’m afraid you’re going to pay the penalty of being outside the main streams of development.”

  “The best British painters are that.”

  “Eh?”

  “Hogarth. Blake. Turner. Spencer. Burra.”

  “Oh, you like these? Turner is good, of course. His handling of colour anticipates Odilon Redon and Jackson Pollock. Well, I’ll do my best for you, though this is one of my busy weeks. The Glasgow and Edinburgh schools are having their diploma shows, so I haven’t much space.”

  At the end of an article about other people the Herald said this:

  It isn’t easy to discover Cowlairs Parish Church in the depths of northeast Glasgow, but hardy souls who make the effort will find Duncan Thaw’s (unfinished) Genesis mural worth a great deal more than a passing glance.

  The newspapers sickened him of the mural. He had taken months to make every shape as clear and harmonious as possible, putting in nothing he didn’t feel lovely or exciting. He knew that reports must always simplify and twist, but he also felt that the most twisted report gives some idea of its cause, and his work had caused nothing but useless gossip. He lay curled on the pulpit floor, dozing and waking till afternoon, then rose and stared, biting his thumb knuckle, at the unfinished wall. All he could see in it now were complicated shapes. With a slam and clattering McAlpin and Drummond came in followed by Macbeth. Thaw gazed at them astonished and relieved.

  “We are here,” said Drummond, “because we read in the papers that you are holding weekday services in which Negroes are raped by white women.”

  “You will gather that we are slightly puggled,” said McAlpin. “Stotious,” said Drummond.

  “Miraculous,” said McAlpin.

  “Full,” said Drummond.

  They starting running round the church along the backs of pews, zigzagging through the nave and up into the gallery, pausing for new views of the mural and shouting to each other: “I can see the whole window wall from here.”

  “Good God, there’s a diver in it.”

  “The tree looks best from above.”

  “But I see a dung beetle you can’t see.”

  Macbeth sat heavily beside Thaw saying, “They’ve got their diplomas. They can laugh.”

  They came down at last and Drummond said soberly “It’s all right, Duncan, you’ve nothing to worry about.”

  “You like it?”

  “We’re envious,” said McAlpin. “At least I am. Come for a drink.”

  “Gladly! Where to?”

  “Remember I’ve only half a crown,” said Drummond.

  “I’ve twenty-six pounds,” said Thaw. “But it has to last till my next mural.”

  Drummond said, “This is clearly a Wine 64 night.”

  “What is Wine 64?”

  “Not a dr
op of it is drunk before it’s sixty-four days old, yet a tumblerful costs only fourpence. It’s so strong I only drink it once a year. Twice would damage the health. The only pub selling it is in Grove Street, but we’ll be safe because there’s three of us.”