Of Me and Others

by Alasdair Gray

  On Wednesday evening I hold a writing seminar where the work of one student is discussed, copies of the work being distributed to the other members the week before, so that they can judge it privately. At the seminar it is read aloud by the author, then discussed with a view to improving what some may dislike. Most writers of stories or poems start without encouragement of parents and friends, so feel that having made one is a solitary achievement they must protect. But though writing must be done in a shell of privacy its purpose is to break that shell. The assumption behind our most intimate works is that our strongest feelings and thoughts may be told in public language. The Wednesday seminars, like the tutorials, are for those who (of course) want approval for their work, but also useful criticism.

  I am sorry that nobody, so far, has asked my advice on the prose of their theses or scientific reports. I believe most writing nowadays is more obscure than it should be, and this is as true in the sciences as in poetry, especially in the indefinite sciences of philosophy, psychology and sociology, which were regarded as branches of literature until the middle of the last century. This obscurity, I think, is not caused by the unavoidable increase of technical terms, but by a general habit of using many-syllabled phrases instead of ordinary words. This inflation (too many syllables chasing too little meaning) comes from the old error that because educated people know more long words than others they should use them as often as possible. The odd result is that in universities most people speak clearer prose than they write.

  There are several things l have failed to do. When l started in October l intended (having written more plays than anything else) to see a lot of the Student Theatre Group. Tuition and my own private work prevented this, in spite of Robert Paterson producing an effective lunch-hour performance of my play The Loss of the Golden Silence. Nor have l contacted the university TV service about the possibility of recording presentations of student work. Nor have l continued the lunch-time readings by well-known authors started by my predecessor, Alan Spence. I will start repairing the last omission in May, when the Irish poet Seamus Heaney will come and read to us. Look out for posters.

  Of Joan Ure: Playwright*

  WHEN JOAN URE was born in 1919 she was christened Elizabeth Carswell. Her father was an engineer with Vickers-Armstrong. Both parents came from three generations of small Clydeside shipbuilders and engineers, folk who had managed by hard work, thrift and steady, conventional behaviour to get free of the unemployment and poverty which threatened all parts, but especially the less skilled or more reckless part, of the Scottish work-force. An anecdote. Betty Carswell’s grandfather, a foreman, often spent an evening seated alone in the best parlour of his house, consuming a bottle of whisky in perfectly orderly silence. Had he drunk in a pub with fellow-workers he would have lessened his authority over them and perhaps lost the confidence of his employer. Had he drunk with his wife and family he would have lessened his authority over them and lost their respect. Betty was born into a culture which gave her good food, good clothing and a well-furnished home in return for self-suppression. In the nineteen-twenties bottle-parties and sexual daring were fashionable among wealthy people, but the lower-middle classes or respectable working classes (call them what you like) maintained a code of careful manners which recalled the world of Jane Austen.

  Betty then had a younger sister, Joan, and younger brother, John. They went to family gatherings where their mother presented them to her mother for a clothes-inspection, and reported their behaviour in the previous week, and got approval and reinforcement for the rewards and punishments she had meted out. After a meal the men conversed on one side of the room, the women on the other, and the children by turns gave little recitations in the middle.

  When Betty was twelve her mother entered hospital with tuberculosis, and Betty became her father’s house-wife and working mother to her sister and brother. Mrs Carswell came home after two years and thereafter managed the house from her bedroom. It was important for Betty to keep looking happy. Depression was construed as ingratitude to the mother who bore her, the father who nourished. How did she avoid becoming a neurotic drudge or empty-headed puppet? By imagination. By developing an inner world where, for a change, she had authority. It was not an exclusive world. When seven she had written a thirteen-page story and given it to her mother, thinking it beautiful. Mrs Carswell punished her for a misdeed by burning it, and was surprised by how much she cried. Before the days of television there were no university grants, there was no national health service and an invalid in the family was a financial burden. Betty wanted to be a teacher, she would have been a splendid teacher, but she left school at fifteen then became a typist in Glasgow Corporation housing department. Two years later she met and married a businessman and became Mrs Betty Clark. The Second World War began. Mr Clark was posted overseas and for five years she lived alone in Glasgow bringing up her young daughter.

  By this time she must have appeared as she did in the last twenty years of her life when I came to know her; small, slender, fair-haired, with beautifully clear-cut features and always very young-looking, though a little too bony – her guilt about being supported by someone else, implanted in childhood, lasted through marriage and led her to eat too little. She made her own clothes and dressed very well. She was eye-catching in a way that was too individual to be merely fashionable, too smart to be eccentric. Her manner upset some people at first, she was so ladylike, and polite, and anxious to be helpful and understanding in every possible way. And within this gushing manner was a gleam of desperate amusement amounting to laughter, because her intelligence was saying, “Yes, we must help and understand each other in every possible way all the time, which can’t be done. Yet it must be done.” In later years this manner greatly disturbed directors of her plays. She was not afraid of authority but she knew people in authority have delicate egos, and it distressed her to hurt them by explaining how her work should be performed, and why bits should not be cut out and others grafted in. It also distressed them to find that, in spite of her eagerly submissive manner, she could not be brushed aside.

  But at the end of the war Betty had not committed herself to being anyone but Mrs Clark. Her life so far, though sad, and providing all the insights a writer needs, had not been unusual for a woman. Then two extra hard things happened. Her young sister Joan returned from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force to live with her parents, and entered a religious melancholy, though the family was not particularly religious. Joan was found dead under a bridge with her face in a stream, perhaps by misadventure, perhaps not. Then Betty entered hospital with tuberculosis. Lung-scars showed she contracted it while nursing her mother.

  Much later she wrote a story about a woman with a talent. Thinking it too small to matter, she suppresses it, and faints. She is pleased, for that suggests the talent is genuine. To be absolutely certain she hides it again. “Very soon she coughed up the first gobbets of blood. And there she saw, brilliant at last, the brightness of the tiny talent she had.” The woman dies rejoicing. She knows her talent is genuine, for it was death to hide it.

  Betty used the materials of her life as much as any writer, but was seldom autobiographical. The people she presents are alternative forms of herself, the ends of roads she had walked short distance along. She did not to hide her talent. She signed herself out of hospital against medical advice and lived another thirty years. To become a writer she took a pen-name: Joan Ure. It is a Scottish tradition. The authors of Waverley, The House with the Green Shutters, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle and Sunset Song did it, mainly to avoid embarrassing their relations. The lowland Scots suspect the creative imagination. John Knox, the man we love to hate, is usually blamed but poverty is the cause. English inheriting classes know that imagination can be a way of managing things. Artistic wives and offspring can get jobs connected with publishing, television or education. Where there is little wealth even those who have some fear the future and are sure that only carefulness will help them survive it. T
hey know imagination can excite passions, especially sexual ones, and lead to discontent and extravagant action. For those with low salaries and positions, unimaginative carefulness often is a way to avoid pain in the short run. In the long run it makes us the easy tools of people with high salaries and positions, and when they have no use for us they drop us in the shit. As in 1985 Britain. So an active imagination, though painful, is our only hope, and by imagination I do not mean fantasy. In Joan Ure’s play Something ln It For Ophelia, a young, energetic, slightly stupid girl has been to a performance of Hamlet and recognized in Ophelia (exploited and abused by a father and boyfriend who have no real interest in her) a form of herself. Appalled, she feels such things should not be shown on stage, and people certainly should not be applauded. She has read in the Scotsman that the Scottish suicide rate is as high as the Swedish, but most of our suicides are women.

  So Joan Ure became an imaginative intelligence pointing us to passionate self-knowledge, the only knowledge able to make us so self-governing and tough that we cannot be managed and dropped by others. I am not particularly speaking of women when I say ‘us’ and ‘we’. Of course she wanted women’s liberation, but liked men too much to wish the sexes divorced. I doubt if matriarchy attracted her. As a child she had lived under one. Her plays handle the common-place facts: that hard housework, factory-work, office-work are unavoidable but we wither without freedom; that all could have more freedom with a fair sharing of power, but are everywhere in chains because we live unfairly, our love twisted by exploitation and warfare, men oppressing women and other men with their greater economic strength, women exploiting men and other women with their greater emotional insight. Yet Joan’s plays are not dour, but witty, moving, and usually short. I’ll speak of those I like most.

  I SEE MYSELF AS THIS YOUNG GIRL

  40 minutes, 3 actors

  A middle-aged woman, left to mind a baby by her brisk student daughter, encounters a lonely sales-clerk who has “adventured out in his shorts”. Each reveals the fantasies that keep them going. She imagines herself a young girl – not the actual daughter who exploits her, but someone more sentimental with nobody to help her. This is the one way she can allow herself the luxury of self-pity. The play is about the need to soar above our responsibilities without abandoning them. The tone of it is funny and melancholy.

  SOMETHING IN IT FOR OPHELIA

  40 minutes, 2 actors

  A Scottish Hamlet and Ophelia meet on Waverley Station platform while waiting for a train and reveal themselves as incapable of love. Ophelia is the tougher of the two but less admirable. She leaves the more sensitive Hamlet prostrate. Funny and harsh.

  THE HARD CASE

  40 minutes, 1 actor

  A football fan, a small Glasgow businessman, is so appalled by the death of the children crushed at the end of that disastrous Rangers-Celtic game of 1970 that he deliberately smashes a shop window to get the chance of making a public statement about it. In the course of that statement he becomes his own judge, and binds himself over to keep the peace. At the time of writing it looked as if a new period of decency for Scottish football was beginning because the managers of both Rangers and Celtic had promised to abandon the policies which increased their gate money along with insensitive violence leading to stampede and killing. This is now forgotten. Rangers still refuse to employ Catholic players. Nowadays only Joan’s play deals with Scottish football, and injustice, and that disaster, so openly yet delicately. No other writers have dared tackle it. Too big for them.

  THE LECTURER AND THE LADY

  40 minutes, 2 actors

  In this play Joan Ure is confronted by Betty Clark. An ageing, conventional housewife approaches a young adventurous thinker, hoping she will receive the inspiration to leave the very dull husband she loves. She does not get it. The thinker who has abandoned her child and husband – “Two terrible things! And not been struck down dead!” – will not advise everyone to do as she did. When they part the brave thinker is sadder for having met the lady, the lady is a little braver for having met the lecturer.

  CONDEMNED FOR ECSTASY

  75 minutes, 7 or 8 actors

  This is a play about oppression and liberation, and is based on two peculiar historical events. In the late 17th century a pious, dutiful young woman, who kept house for her widowed father and bachelor brothers, found such consolation in reading about the sufferings of Jesus that she entered ecstatic states and coughed blood. She was tried for this by the local kirk session and told that her ecstasy was the work of the devil, and she should not submit to it. A hundred years later, at the time of the French Revolution, a remarkable Ayrshire woman got such ascendancy over her minister that he helped her found a matriarchal commune with herself as the Holy Mother. The stories of these women are introduced by a late 19th century “New Woman” of the Beatrice Webb type, who realizes that the outlandish failure and success of the earlier women is a form of her own.

  The foregoing is a partial list and only includes her plays which I have seen well acted. Take Your Old Rib Back Then is a play I cannot read with pleasure – the words on the page recall the gabbling of the actress I heard say them. The long speeches embarrassed so she spoke too fast. Joan’s plays had very few decent productions because: she worked in Scotland where hardly any theatres used local writing. All but a few of her plays are short, a two hour performance would require more than one and the public aren’t thought to like that. Her plays were clever, and managements are uneasy with unfamiliar work which is cleverer than them – they think it may be stupid. Joan’s characters hardly ever shout and always converse in clear, formal language. Restoration dramatists, great lrishmen and Noél Coward can do that, but surely not the Scots! We are a tough, violent people. O.K.?

  To get her work seen Joan directed small productions performed by friends wherever she could, and sometimes acted in them. She worked hard, usually unpaid with amateurs and companies trying to change things, like the abortive Scottish Stage Company and the Scottish Society of Play Wrights, which survives. She is partly responsible for a few things being slightly better for playwrights in Scotland today, but the wear on her highly-strung nature was punishing. Most writers grow a surface to protect their nerves, rhinoceros hide or porcupine bristles or slippery suavity or facetious jollity. Joan Ure never did. What you saw of her at any time was all there was, so even the company of close friends exhausted her after an hour or two. Apart from a year when she got a Scottish Arts Council grant she had always too little money. Her intense drive and intense fragility led some to call her “the iron butterfly”. Intellectually she was no butterfly, physically she was not iron. She did not rust and corrode like many but drove to breaking point. Her last months were painful and lonely. She refused to depend on friends, loathed hospitals, but had to enter them before her lungs completely failed.

  The value of a life is not in its end but in what it has given the world before. I admire Joan Ure’s art so find much in her life to mourn, nothing to wish undone. She left several poems, an uncounted number of short stories and essays, over twenty-four plays and play fragments. Manuscripts and typescripts of these are now owned by Glasgow University Library. The Scottish Society of Playwrights has acting copies of most completed plays, and has published Five Short Plays by Joan Ure, with an introduction by Christopher Small. Joan’s bad luck still pursues her art. The book, though readable, is unevenly inked, has irritating typographical errors, and contains The Hard Case in a mutilated radio version. But in the University and S.S.P. Iibraries her work is where directors, actors and scholars who enjoy good writing can always obtain copies with out much fuss or great expense. Her daughter, a doctor in Canada, and her brother John Carswell, in Newton Mearns, have her personal letters, diaries and tape-recordings. I hope one day to see a complete volume of all her plays, and of her poems and prose pieces.

  At her funeral in 1978 the writers and theatre folk who knew Joan Ure met Betty Clark’s family for the first time, and made a surp
rising discovery. We had thought Joan a woman in her late forties who looked much younger, when she was on the verge of sixty. In this matter our friend, whose life and art expressed more truth than most, had let us deceive ourselves. I don’t know why this cheered me, a little.

  * This biographical sketch was one of the three I had in the Lean Tales anthology published by Jonathan Cape in 1985. It was based on a Scottish BBC radio documentary about her life commissioned from me and broadcast in 1978 or 79.

  Epilogue to Lanark

  This contains my ideas for writing this, my 1st novel: ideas that well-known writers usually give in their prologues or epilogues. Not being known outside the small world of Scots writing, I put this between chapters 40 and 41, and kept some of the narrative going through it. For 3 years publication was delayed by lucky accidents which gave me time to illustrate the book and add to the Index of Plagiarisms, in a column like this one, in the outer margin of the main text. In alphabetic order it gave names of all the writers I enjoyed & words I had stolen from them, with the pages on which they appeared. This was both a parody of academic criticism & a fair example of that. Reviewers then, & lecturers since liked it, but there is no room to print it here.

  HE ENTERED A ROOM with no architectural similarity to the building he had left. The door on this side had deeply moulded panels and a knob, the ceiling was bordered by an elaborate cornis of acanthus sprays. There was a tall bay window with the upper foliage of a chestnut tree outside and an old stone tenement beyond. The rest of the room was hidden by easels holding large paintings of the room. The pictures seemed brighter and cleaner than the reality and the tall beautiful girl with long blonde hair reclined in them, sometimes nude and sometimes clothed. The girl herself, more worried and untidy than in her portraits, stood near the window wearing a paint-stained butchers apron. With a very small brush she was adding leaves to a view of the tree outside the window, but she paused, pointed round the edge of the picture and told Lanark, “He’s there.”