Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  One day Jock Brown came to me and said that if I gave him my passport he would get me a ticket for an aeroplane going to London that evening. The ticket cost thirty pounds. Jock did not offer to lend me money. He took my passport, returned with a ticket and helped me to the airport. I crossed Spain at twice the altitude of Everest. It looked brown and as flat as a map. The only memorable feature was the white circle of the bullring in the middle of each town. London was foggy. I went to the University hospital and was given an intravenous adrenaline injection to help me reach Glasgow by overnight train. At Glasgow Central Station I took a taxi to the Royal Infirmary where I was drugged and sent home by ambulance. The morning was fresh and springlike but I felt no joy in homecoming. Glasgow was as I expected.

  To sum up, what good was the tour? What did it teach me? Not much about the world, a lot about myself. That I fear to change is evident. Of course we must always change, since the moment of birth starts the alterations and adaptions called growth, which is often gradual and foreseeable. If our surroundings don’t change much, neither do we. But surroundings can change radically and suddenly. A war began and I hid with neighbours in a dark shelter, queer noises outside. My mother died, I left school, found another, was awarded a scholarship, went to a foreign land in the belly of a posh liner. These events should have made me more independent, but I feared losing the habits by which I knew myself, so withdrew into asthma. My tour was spent in an effort to avoid maturity gained by new experience. Yet in spite of the protective clutter of doctors in which I ended the trip that effort failed. Maturity is either bravely accepted or kicked against, but events always impose some of it. Before going abroad the idea of teaching art to children appalled me. I have now done it for five months, and compared with partial suffocation it is almost painless. I will soon have paid Jock Brown what I owe him, and will then pay my father. Since coming home I have had no more bad asthma attacks, and no longer fear them. The Bellahouston Travelling Scholarship has done me good.

  11 Findhorn Street

  Riddrie, Glasgow C3

  April 1959

  POSTSCRIPT. Wishing to attach to this report photographs of my Triumph of Neptune I wrote to Jock Brown asking if he would take and send me some. He answered that this was impossible. Soon after I left the hostel it was visited by the wife of Gibraltar’s governor. She felt the naked mermaids and the nereids in the commonroom were a bad moral influence upon the soldiers using the place, so her husband asked Jock to paint them out. Jock, who liked my mural, wrote to the Secretary of State for War, Mr Jack Profumo, asking if he need obey the governor’s request. Mr Profumo replied that “the man on the spot knows best”, by whom he meant, not Jock Brown, but the governor’s wife. So Jock, with rage in his heart, covered my mermaids in a coat of khaki paint. It is pleasent to imagine a more liberal age one day restoring them to light. However, the town of Gibraltar needs room to expand, and in a year or two the south bastion will be demolished.

  The World of Four to Seven

  After art school I earned money by part-time art teaching without a truly qualified certificate, for I lacked a pass in maths & another language then needed to enter a teacher training college. Shortage of teachers led to entrance being granted to folk with only my art school diploma. It was wonderful to again live on a State bursary and be trained to teach. This was much easier than being a teacher. Scots Education needed another thesis from me. I liked putting this one together in 1960 for the teachers training college of old Jordanhill, now merged with the Strathclyde University campus. I illustrated it with orginal pictures in poster-colour by infants of Wellshot Road Primary School, close to Tollcross Park, and what was Parkhead Forge.

  UP TO THE AGE OF FOUR YEARS most children are action painters – they enjoy paint as they enjoy mud and sand, painting is a business of making sploshy marks. Beyond the age of four years, their painting becomes articulate. They start to make images of things in the world they inhabit. It is a strange world, at once more limited and more arbitrary than ours. This thesis attempts to describe the stages by which that world evolves into the world that we adults inhabit.

  It has been said that infants paint in symbols. I think this untrue. The Everyday English Dictionary calls a symbol: “That which represents something else”, while The Westminster Dictionary calls it “The sign or representation of something moral or intellectual”. By these definitions no infant art and hardly any child art is symbolic. In the adult world a wig, a flag, a cross and boy archer represent respectively justice, a nation and a religion and love; but up to the age of five infants know none of these things, and therefore do not need to symbolize them. Infants love and are loved, but do not know love, fear punishment but have no theory of justice to assure them that it is deserved. As a result they are thorough materialists, and more objective about the things they experience than they can ever be again. They have no sense of tragedy or reverence, as any teacher knows who has heard an infant speak of a family disaster.

  To sum up, the infant world has facts in it, but no truths. The only things they paint, therefore, are facts; such unarguable facts as their mummy, daddy, house, dinner, bed, and (of course) selves. These are usually depicted in a spaceless world – space, after all, is not a thing, its existence has to be deduced by refering to things, and this deduction comes gradually to children over several years. The infant world has no space in it because the things in that world are not much thought of as being related to each other, but only to the infant.

  When Margaret Carson made the painting of things at home, she painted mummy, television, door, bath, cooker, pot, bed and me with mummy biggest and herself not much bigger than anything else, nor does she consider the relation of these things to the rooms they are in though they are shown the right way up. Ann Anderson who is also five paints some of the same things when showing visitors coming for a meal. She does this in a plan view of the table with six chairs round it, and finding it hard to paint visitors on the chairs she has painted a separate table to one side with somebody on it – probably herself. In the anonymous painting above Ann’s there is not the same attempt to show an event – but the things and people are all seen from in front on a kitchen floor and only a fork and spoon above are shown in plan.

  I insist that there is no symbolism in these paintings. In the picture of a family out walking the father is shown with everything the artist remembers as important about his father – long legs, pipe with smoke coming out and a hat. If he had remembered arms he would have included them too.

  I said earlier that the young infant does not know love or justice. This is because knowledge of a thing depends on the power to see it in other people. Infants are too self-centred to recognize love in other people, therefore they cannot recognize it in themselves. Gradually, through experience, they recognize that the things of this world are related to each other in an order which does not depend upon them. A little later than this they come to recognize that other people do not exist purely to help them, but sometimes also need help. Thus they discover sympathy. Not surprisingly the first manifestations of sympathy are towards things weaker than the child itself, often a pet animal.

  Most children sense that animals, like themselves, are small and dependant. These pictures show that fellow feeling goes to the lengths of giving it a human size. Of course in lonely or neglected children the discovery of the space which cuts people off from each other will be resisted, and they will continue to inhabit a self-centred world which their companions have grown away from. Such children develop with some defect of the sympathetic emotion; either it is suppressed and replaced by coldness or even cruelty, or exhibited in an excessive form towards something unworthy of it. At best the child of five and six is beginning to live in a larger and less arbitrary world –> physically larger and morally less arbitrary.

  Here are pictures of this world, mostly by boys. Everything happens between earth and sky. Mummy & Daddy, figures who occurred all the time in earlier pictures, are nowhere to b
e seen. The subject for all six was “a game in the park”. Everybody has included some non-human living thing though this was not insisted upon. Aeroplanes are popular – suggesting liberty and manliness. One boy has gone to the length of differentiating himself by painting a woollen helmet of which he is particularly proud. Note that this boy is the only one to recognize that the sky is not like a ceiling, but actually begins at ground level. These children of seven are aware of space, though they may not have accepted the limitlessness of space. They will be found to have a sense of what is “fair”, even if they depart from it, and will have some kind of code of what is due to one’s companions and oneself. In short, they have started to use truths (justice, honour) to guide them through the wilderness of mere facts.

  An Apology for my Recent Death

  On 18th January 1965 this article was sent to the Glasgow Herald which did not use it, but the making of the film led to London visits and meeting TV producers. These gave ideas for The Fall of Kelvin Walker, a play broadcast by London BBC TV in 1968. This led to Stewart Conn, head of Scots BBC radio drama, over the next 10 years commissioning & broadcasting half a dozen of my radio plays. Combined with income from a few TV works & lecturing on art appreciation for the extra mural department of The University of Glasgow, I earned enough to live without school teaching & hardly ever getting Social Security help. Despite mixed feelings at the time, I now think this a worthwhile film.

  IN LAST WEEK’S RADIO TIMES was a photograph of me looking sombre, beside an article which began: ‘I first met the late Alasdair Gray ten years ago on New Year’s Eve in Glasgow...’ It was signed ‘Robert Kitts’. I was only slightly surprised (I had expected something similar) but I was still depressed and uneasy. The mistake came from several discussions and compromises which began last summer when the BBC started making a documentary television film about my work. I must apologise to those who were upset by that mistake which, as printed in the Radio Times, is an outright lie. I can do that best by telling how it happened.

  I first met Bob Kitts ten years ago on New Year’s Eve in Glasgow outside the State Bar in Holland Street. We were both studying to be painters, I in Glasgow School of Art, he in the London Slade. Both were just out of our teens or nearly so, both of us spoke vigorously with local accents (I Glaswegian, he Cockney), both had been drinking but I was the least sober. We began a conversation that lasted through a succession of parties, thus learning that as working class children our lives had both been re-shaped by World War II evacuations from the cities of our birth, and that we were now beneficiaries of the welfare state created after it, especially the education grants. We were both writing long novels based on our experiences, novels showing what was good and bad in the nation that had given birth to such remarkable geniuses as ourselves.

  Thus began a lasting friendship kept up by his occasional visits to Glasgow and mine to London, and an exchange of letters between these. On our first night together we agreed that our equal interests in both pictorial and literary art must one day come together in the art of film-making. This never happened with me, but before leaving the Slade Bob went into film studies and after early struggles became first an ITV film director, then a director for the BBC second channel under Hugh Wheldon, producer of Monitor, the arts programme catering for what Wheldon calls “the large minority” – viewers not only interested in classical music and drama, but in avant-garde forms, or both. Wheldon is open to new ideas.

  On leaving art school I tried to go on painting and writing while earning money, first as a part-time art teacher, then for a short spell as a cabaret performer. Then I married and became a full-time art teacher to support my family. Perhaps I found teaching more frustrating than many, because it left so little time for making things I felt would one day please people more. I remember writing to Bob, saying I felt like a stoker of a locomotive engine, compelled to fuel a train travelling in the opposite direction to my talent.

  Luckily I got the chance of becoming a painter of scenery for Dick Whittington, the Pavilion Theatre pantomime. The wage was less than for teaching but the work far more agreeable. At Christmas when the pantomime opened the Pavilion management decided that in future it would rent all scenery from an English firm of theatrical suppliers. The set painting department where I was designer and painter closed and for a month I became assistant set painter at Glasgow Citizens Theatre, but did not last because I failed to satisfy the head designer. This led to a spell of unemployment and life on the dole, not my first. Between one school and another, one job and another, I had been often unemployed. This was my first spell as a married man. My wife did not complain – she had just borne our son and liked having me to help at home. Sale of a drawing or painting sometimes brought in a little money which I admit I did not declare to The Authorities.

  This spell of unemployment lasted into the summer of 1964 when I received a letter from Bob saying that at last he was being paid to make films on themes of his own choosing. He wanted to make a film about me and would I phone him at BBC London, reversing the charges? I did: and after hiding my exhilaration at his proposal under a few words of modest acceptance we discussed the film.

  All documentary films I had seen about living artists had struck me as false. I remember one where Graham Sutherland walked down a lane looking for something to sketch, pretending not to notice a van with a camera which must have been travelling slowly in front of him. I knew from Sutherland’s paintings he must often walk through the countryside looking for things to sketch, but knew too that when the film was being made he could not be really doing that – he must be acting the part. That he was acting himself seemed even more false than pretending to be someone else. In Bob’s film I did not want to be shown in my studio pretending to paint, while my wife came in with the baby and a cup of coffee pretending to be my wife. An artist’s person adds nothing to true enjoyment of art, though I suspect that Van Gogh cut off his ear has given simple pleasure to more than enjoy his sunflowers. Interest in artists as people degrades art into excuses for gossip. I wanted Bob to film my paintings and record my voice, and leave my private life private.

  We discussed this through telephone calls and a weekend when he came north to stay with us. He explained that the sort of art-film I wanted would be switched off at once by most viewers who cared nothing for the pictures and words of an obscure Scotsman unless, like trout, they were first attracted by the worm of my person into biting the hook of the arty stuff behind. Then Bob came up with an idea which would let me appear on the screen as little as I wished, yet still arouse interest. He would have me talking straight to the camera at the start of the film, then with melancholy music and a commentator speaking in the past tense would imply that I had died soon after. He would go on to present my personality through the words of people who had known me, then have a long sequence about the works themselves, with my voice talking over them reading my relevant verse.

  The film would end in a Glasgow BBC television control room where I would be filmed along with himself, discussing reasons for the deception.

  He persuaded me that this was a good idea whenever we talked about it, but when talking of it to others I felt uneasy. He said ‘I’ll write a piece about it for the Radio Times leaving readers unsure if you’re alive or dead, so they’ll switch on the TV to find out.’

  Five weeks after filming in Glasgow Bob had me come to London to record material for the soundtrack, I saw the film nearly completed and was shocked by two things. My appearance was not as firm and manly as I wished, and though everyone I knew in the film spoke kindly, some exaggerations and omissions made me seem that harmless comic, The Mad Artist.

  Mr Young, Session Clerk of Greenhead Church, said that when working on my mural I said I would finish it in a week, yet completed it three years later. True; but this omits that in a week, I brought the mural to an acceptable state from the congregation’s point of view, but not from my own. Mr Hart, the Minister, saw I was unhappy to leave it and told me to comp
lete it when I liked. I was painting for nothing but the cost of the materials, was delayed by my need to earn money, so in my free time I felt justified in making every alteration that would improve the mural. Mr Young may have explained this to the camera, but it was left out in the editing. No film about a real subject can record every relevant fact so I am foolish to quarrel with how I came to seem. But Mr Bovey, I was not carried out of the McLellan Galleries on a stepladder. Mr McAllister, in the Scotland USSR Friendship Society I did not use four dozen teacups to mix my paint.

  Before the film appeared, the Radio Times had an article calling me “the late Alasdair Gray” and conveying that I was very dead indeed. Bob tells me (I believe him) that the word “late” was added by a Radio Times sub-editor who, sure I must be dead, had made alterations to leave no doubt. Only viewers can say if they enjoyed the film but I know some who felt annoyed and cheated. I am to blame for that. By preventing the film being made to show normal kinds of falseness it showed a larger kind.

  Instead of An Apology

  This swipe at London BBC’s anti-Scots ideas still holds good. Unlike the last apology, this one appeared in the 1969 Glasgow Herald, when TV commissions had begun to come from the London BBC & Granada, so I expected a secure future in television. I was paid for this play but it was finally turned down by someone senior to the producer who had wanted it. A year or two later I acquired an excellent literary agent in London, Francis Head, who sold it to Granada. It was broadcast titled Triangles. When in later years my I had succeded as a novelist but lacked ideas for more, this was one of my forgotten plays that I turned into prose fiction. In 1996 Bloomsbury published it with the title Mavis Belfrage: with 5 Shorter Tales.