Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  Visual artists are Classic, Romantic, Realist.

  Classical artists subdue their passions through cool reasoning, test their subconscious intuitions against social analysis. Such artists ride on their emotions like rowing boats on calm water, their social consciousness adjusting and steering. Their politics are conservative. When they fail it is by turning their best ideas into repetitive academic forms. They often die rich and respected.

  Romantic artists make their powers of reasoning and social analysis serve their passions and instinctive feelings. They are moved like yachts by the wind of their passions, the conscious intellect working to stop them overturning, which sometimes happens. Their politics are radical, sometimes revolutionary. They sometimes die through poverty and neglect, while delighting posterity.

  Classical artists convey delight through the equilibrium of broad, general views. Romantic artists convey delight through the impetus of deep, intense views. Realists differ from both by their subject being modern life, using fewer examples from the past.

  Problems arise when we try to enlist painters under one of these headings. No artist wholly belongs under any one. The pictures of Giotto, Poussin, David, Ingres and Cézanne have a carefully constructed calmness we may call Classical with a capital C. Giotto lived before that word was used of the visual arts, but the last four consciously strove to be Classical. But David – “he of the blood-stained brush,” as Walter Scott called him – was a political revolutionary. There is a turbulence in the compositions of Michelangelo, El Greco, Goya and Van Gogh, and this fits with the often tormented private lives of the first and last two, yet El Greco was an Orthodox Catholic whose work was as much commissioned by the Spanish priesthood as Giotto’s by the Italian. How can such words be attached to the works of Leonardo, Breughel, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Velasquez? All the big labels art historians, journalists and polemicists find so useful – Realist, Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Cubist and Surrealist – are too vague to suggest the quality of one fine work of art.

  Art criticism is most helpful when it is most empirical, thus we know what is meant when a picture is called a crucifixion, nativity, portrait, nude, landscape and still life. When governments still bought huge paintings for their palaces and museums in the 18th and 19th centuries what were called History Paintings were thought greatest because they often used elements of all the foregoing kinds of picture. In the introduction I said I would describe the main artistic categories: there are only two: good and bad. All other categories are built upon individual preferences and biases among work that is generally agreed to be good. Therefore when I describe (with examples) the epic category of painting, and even construct a theory of the pictorial epic, understand that I am consciously working inside the limits of an individual psychology. Certain paintings have given me more acute delight than others, therefore I believe their painters had a more intense apprehension of eternity than others, therefore I think their scope sufficiently wide to be called “epic.”

  THE EPIC CATEGORY

  Grunewald’s polyptych at Colmar, Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, Mantegna’s Crucifixion, Tintoretto’s Last Supper and Gauguin’s What are we? Where do we come from? Whither do we go? are epic paintings. In each of them I feel that the artist looked intensely in and intensely out. He looked into the universe he contained and at the universe containing him, and he realised and explained in his picture a very important thing about the nature of them both. The discovery contained in these paintings is too vast to be merely tragic. They all deal with men in an open space – and that space is the universe. In Rembrandt’s painting the psychological depth of the portrait faces is as great and implies as much as the depth of space on the city wall on which they stand. The organization of the crowd is superb. This is not a rabble or a mob. It is not a disciplined troupe. It is moving, but not concertedly. There are drums, weapons, banners being carried and held, but casually. The gestures of the men are also casual, but important. But most significant of all is the unrelatedness of the individuals, the psychological gulfs between each of them. Obviously they are one group, but none of them seem to recognise that the others exist – or they recognise it only casually, almost somnambulistically. They are held together by the gulfs of light and shadow between them.

  In Grunewald’s crucifixion there is greater awareness between the members of the group around the cross, but the awareness is an agony. Grunewald was terribly conscious of what the flesh was capable of sustaining. The terrible unremitting abyss of the universe. It is really against this that Christ is crucified. On the left side his mother sways back, supported by St John, with Mary Magdalene on her knees at their feet. Both women are working their hands together, in a way which is partly prayer, partly a way to distract their attention from the agony of Christ by making a physical sensual pressure against themselves. On the other side of the cross stands St Peter, feet slightly straddled, pointing to the agony on the cross with his forefinger in a gesture which is so undramatic and pedagogical that the horror of the situation is weighted more heavily.

  Each of these paintings, in their own way, describes the condition of mind in the universe in pictorial images. Each is intensely aware of the unknown, the ordinary, the remote, the horrible: the ordinary in The Night Watch, the remote in Gauguin’s painting, the horrible in Grunewald’s; the inhuman precision of Mantegra’s conception exaggerates the everyday nature of the crime of the crucifixion, planted as the cross is in the geological stratas supporting a city; while Tintoretto behind a room whose marble floor is littered with kitchen utensils, shows dim divine presences lurking behind a busy crowd of eating men who seem unaware of their radiant halos.

  Each of these paintings (with the possible exception of the Gauguin) is too vast and too stark for comfortable acceptance. Each is too full of the facts of our condition to be accepted with anything less than delight. These pictures are not tragic. Tragedy depends on the feeling that death has perhaps the last word. It is a literary conception. In these paintings life and vacuity, pain and struggle and man’s phenomenal persistence are shown as fundamental, eternal, and limitlessly generative. That is why I think them epic paintings.

  A Report to the Trustees

  The original of this is also a sheaf of lined fullscap pages folded together, covered with my manuscript in ink. It was written in 1959 over a year after my return from an unhappy trip to Spain. I took many months to turn the events into a careful account of facts without overemphasis. The result was a piece of prose so professional that the trustees thought it was fiction. 25 years later, having run out of ideas for short stories, I used it to fill my space in a book of stories I was sharing with my friends, Agnes Owens and Jim Kelman. This anthology was first suggested to me by a Quartet Books editor, but published by Bloomsbury in 1985 with the overall title Lean Tales, which is now long out of print.

  IAPOLOGIZE TO THE TRUSTEES OF THE BELLAHOUSTON TRAVELLING SCHOLARSHIP AND TO MR BLISS, the director of Glasgow Art School, for the long time I have taken to write this report. Had the tour gone as planned they would have received, when I returned, an illustrated diary describing things done and places visited. But I visited very few places and the things I did were muddled and absurd. To show that, even so, the tour was worth while, I must report what I learned from it. I have had to examine my memory of the events deductively, like an archaeologist investigating a prehistoric midden. It has taken a year to understand what happened to me and the money between October 1957 and March 1958.

  On learning I was awarded the scholarship my first wish had been to travel on foot or bicycle, sketching landscapes and cityscapes around Scotland, for I knew very little of it apart from Glasgow, two islands in the Firth of Clyde, and places seen on day trips to Edinburgh. However, a condition of the scholarship was that I go abroad. I decided to visit London for a fortnight, travel from there to Gibraltar by ship, find a cheap place to live in southern Spain, paint there as long as the money would allow, then travel home through Granada,
Malaga, Madrid, Toledo, Barcelona and Paris, viewing on the way Moorish mosques, baroque cathedrals, plateresque palaces, the works of EI Greco, Velazquez and Goya, with Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Brueghel’s Triumph of Death, and several other grand gaudy things which are supposed to compensate for the crimes of our civilization. The excellence of this plan, approved by Mr Bliss, is not lessened by the fact that I eventually spent two days in Spain and saw nothing of interest.

  On the 31st of October I boarded the London train in Glasgow Central Station. It was near midnight, dark and drizzling, and to save money I had not taken a sleeping car. The prospect of vivid sunshine, new lands and people should have been very exciting, but as the train sped south a sullen gloom settled upon me. I looked at my reflection in the rain-streaked carriage window and doubted the value of a tourist’s shallow experience of anywhere. I was homesick already. I do not love Glasgow much, I sometimes actively hate it, but I am at home here. In London this sickness increased until it underlay quite cheerful feelings and weighed so heavy on the chest that it began to make breathing difficult. I had been in hospital with asthma during the three previous summers, but a doctor treating me had said another very bad attack was unlikely and a trip abroad might do me good. I had a pocket inhaler which eased difficult breathing with puffs of atropine methondrate, papaverine hydrochloride, chlorbutol and adrenaline; and for strong spasms I had a bottle of adrenaline solution and a hypodermic needle to inject myself subcutaneously. In London I slept in a students’ hostel in a street behind the university tower. The dormitory was not large and held about fifty bunks, all occupied. I was afraid to use the inhaler at night in case the noise of it wakened someone, so used the needle, which should have been kept for emergencies. This made sleep difficult. At night I felt trapped in that dormitory and by day I felt trapped in London.

  The main shops and offices in London are as large as ours, sometimes larger, but the dwelling houses are mostly of brick and seldom more than half the height of a Scottish sandstone tenement. Such buildings, in a country town surrounded by meadows, look very pleasant, but a big county of them, horizon beyond horizon beyond horizon, is a desert to me, and not less a desert for containing some great public buildings and museums. I visited these oases as the trustees would have wished, but had continually to leave them for a confusion of streets of which my head could form no clear map. Like most deserts this city is nearly flat and allows no view of a more fertile place. The streets of central Glasgow are also gripped between big buildings but it is always easy to reach a corner where we can see, on a clear day, the hills to the north and to the south. I know I am unfair to London. A normal dweller there has a circle of acquaintance about the size of a small village. Only a stranger feels challenged to judge the place as a whole, which cannot be done, so the stranger feels small and lonely. I visited several publishers with a folder of drawings and a typescript of my poems. I hoped to be asked to illustrate a book, perhaps my own book. I was kindly received and turned away from each place, and although I could not feel angry with the publishers (who would have been out of business if they had not known what was saleable) I turned my disappointment against the city. I grew more asthmatic and walked about refusing to be awed.

  The least awesome place I saw was the government church, Westminster Abbey. This once fine Gothic structure is filled with effigies of landlords, company directors and administrators who got rich by doing exactly what was expected of them, and now stand as solid in their marble wigs, boots and waistcoats as the Catholic saints and martyrs they have replaced. Among them is an occasional stone carved with the name of someone who has been creative or courageous. A less pretentious but nastier place is the Tower of London. Built by the Normans for the enslavement of the English natives (who before this had been a comparatively democratic and even artistic people, judging by their export of illuminated manuscripts to the continent) this fort was used by later governments as an arsenal, jail and bloody police station. Nobody pretends otherwise. The stands of weapons and the pathetic scratchings of the political prisoners on their cell-walls are clearly labelled, and folk who would feel discomfort at a rack of police batons or the barbed fence of a concentration camp feel thrilled because these are supposed to be part of a splendid past. The tower also holds the Crown jewels. There were more of them than I had imagined, twelve or fifteen huge display cabinets of crowns, orbs, maces, swords and ceremonial salt-cellars. Most of it dates from the eighteenth century – I recall nothing as old as the regalia of the sixth Jamie Stewart in Edinburgh castle. I noticed that the less the monarchs were working politicians the more money was spent ornamenting them. The culmination of this development is the huge Crown lmperial, an art nouveau job created for the coronation of Edward the Fat in 1901, when the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the world’s most expensively useless hat on the world’s most expensively useless head.

  Did anything in London please me? Yes: the work of the great cockneys, the Williams Blake and Turner. Also Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Also the underground rail system. I found this last, with the H.G. Wellsian sweep of its triple escalators and lines of framed, glazed advertisements for films and women’s underwear, and tunnels beneath tunnels bridging tunnels, and tickets which allow those who take the wrong train to find their way to the right station without paying extra, a very great comfort.

  But I was glad one morning to get on a boat-train at Liverpool Street Station and begin the second part of the journey to Spain. I was in the company of Ian McCulloch, who had arrived from Glasgow that morning. He is an artist who received his painting diploma at the same time as myself. He also wanted to visit Spain, and had saved the money to do so by working as a gas Iamplighter near Parkhead Forge, Shettleston. We had arranged to travel together and meant to share the rent of a small place in south Spain. The boat-train ran along embankments above the usual streets of small houses, then came to a place where towering structures, part warehouse and part machine, stood among labyrinths of railway-siding. The little brick homes were here also, but the surrounding machinery gave them the dignity of outposts. We arrived at the docks.

  The ship was called the Kenya Castle and long before it unmoored we found it a floating version of the sort of hotel we had never been in before. Our cabin was small but compact. It held two bunks the size of coffins, each with a reading lamp and adjustable ventilator. There was a very small sink with hot and cold water, towels, facecloths, soap, a locker with coat-hangers, a knob to ring for the steward, another for the stewardess. In the lavatories each closet contained, beside the roll of toilet paper, a clean towel, presumably to wipe the lingers-on after using the roll, although there were washbasins and towels in the vestibule outside. (It has just struck me that perhaps the extra towel was for polishing the lavatory seat before use.) The menus in the dining room embarrassed us. They were printed on glazed-surface card and decorated at every meal with a different photograph of some nook of Britain’s African empire – The Governor’s Summer Residence, Balihoo Protectorate, The District Vice-Commissioner’s Bungalow, Janziboola, etc. The food, however, was listed in French. Obviously some foods were alternatives to others, while some could, and perhaps should, be asked for on the same plate. We wanted to eat as much as possible to get the full value of the money we had paid; at the same time we feared we would be charged extra if we ate more than a certain amount. We also feared we would be despised if we asked the waiter for information on these matters. Our table was shared with two priests, Catholic and Anglican. Ian and I were near acquaintances rather than friends. With only our nationality, profession and destination in common we left conversation to the priests. They mainly talked about an audience the Anglican had had with the Pope. He addressed the Catholic with the deference a polite salesman might show to the representative of a more powerful firm. He said the Pope’s hands were beautifully shaped, he had the fingers of an artist, a painter. Ian and I glanced down at our own fingers. Mine had flecks of paint on the nails that I hadn’t managed
to clean off for the previous fortnight.

  After this meal coffee was served in the lounge. The cups were very small with frilled paper discs between themselves and the saucers to absorb the drips. There were many people in the lounge but it was big enough not to seem crowded. Darkness had fallen and we were moving slowly down the Thames. There were magazines on small tables: Vogue, House and Garden, John O’London’s, Punch, the magazines found in expensive dentists’ waiting rooms, nothing to stimulate thought. I played a bad game of chess with lan and ordered two whiskies, which were cheap now we were afloat. I took mine chiefly to anaesthetize the asthma, but lan felt bound to respond by ordering another two, and resented this. He had less money than I and he thought we were starting the trip extravagantly. The ship was leaving the estuary for the sea. I felt the floor of that opulent lounge, till now only troubled by a buried throbbing, take on a quality of sway. I was distracted from the weight on my chest by an uneasy, flickering sensation in my stomach. I therefore left the lounge and went to bed after vomiting into the cabin sink.

  While eating breakfast next morning I watched the portholes in the walls of the saloon. The horizon was moving up and down each of them like the bottom edge of a blind. When the horizon was down nothing could be seen outside but pale grey sky. After a few seconds it would be pulled up and the holes would look on nothing but dark grey water. The priests’ conversation seemed unforgivably banal. I felt homesick, seasick and asthmatic. I went back to bed and used my inhaler but it had stopped having effect. I took a big adrenaline jag. That night breathing became very difficult indeed, I could not sleep and injections did not help much. The impossibility of sitting up in the bunk, the narrowness of the cabin and the movement of the floor increased my sense of suffocation. I lost all memory of normal breathing, and so lost hope of it. However, I could clearly imagine how it would feel to be worse, so fear arrived. Fear lessened the ability to face pain, which therefore increased. At this stage it was hard to stop the fear swelling into panic, because the more pain I felt the more I could imagine. The only way to divert my imagination from its capital accumulation of fear was to think about something else and only erotic images were strong enough to be diverting. Having no experience of sexual satisfaction I recalled women in the London underground advertisements.