“What is lobbying?”
“Please don’t interrupt. You move about discussing the woes of Unthank with whoever will listen. Your untutored eloquence has an effect beyond your expectations, first on women, then on men. Many delegates see that their own lands are threatened by the multinational companies and realize that if something isn’t quickly done the council won’t be able to help them either. So tomorrow when you stand up in the great assembly hall to speak for your land or city (I haven’t worked out which yet), you are speaking for a majority of lands and cities everywhere. The great corporations, you say, are wasting the earth. They have turned the wealth of nations into weapons and poison, while ignoring mankind’s most essential needs. The time has come etcetera etcetera. You sit down amid a silence more significant than the wildest applause and the lord president director himself arises to answer you. He expresses the most full-hearted agreement. He explains that the heads of the council have already prepared plans to curb and harness the power of the creature but dared not announce them until they were sure they had the support of a majority. He announces them now. All work which merely transfers wealth will be abolished, all work which damages or the kills people will be stopped. All profits will belong to the state, no state will be bigger than a Swiss canton, no politician will draw a larger wage than an agricultural labourer. In fact, all wages will be lowered or raised to the national average, and the later to the international average, thus letting people transfer to the jobs they do best without artificial feelings of prestige or humiliation. Stockbrokers, bankers, accountants, property developers, advertisers, company lawyers and detectives will become schoolteachers if they can find no other useful work, and no teacher will have more than six pupils per class. The navy and air forces will be set to providing children everywhere with free meals. The armies will dig irrigation ditches and plant trees. All human excrement will be returned to the land. I don’t know how Monboddo would propose to start this new system, but I could drown the practical details in storms of cheering. At any rate, bliss it is in this dawn to be alive, and massive sums of wealth and technical aid are voted to restore Unthank to healthy working order. You board your aircraft to return home, for you now think of Unthank as home. The sun rises. It precedes you across the sky; you appear with it at noon above the city centre. You descend and are reunited with Rima, who has tired of Sludden. Happy ending. Well?”
Lanark laid down his knife and fork. He said in a low voice, “If you give me an ending like that I will think you a very great man.” “If I give you an ending like that I will be like ten thousand other cheap illusionists! I would be as bad as the late H. G. Wells! I would be worse than Goethe.7 Nobody who knows a thing about life or politics will believe me for a minute!”
Lanark said nothing. The conjuror scratched his hair furiously with both hands and said querulously, “I understand your resentment. When I was sixteen or seventeen I wanted an ending like that. You see, I found Tillyard’s study of the epic in Dennistoun public library, and he said an epic was only written when a new society was giving men a greater chance of liberty. I decided that what the Aeneid had been to the Roman Empire my epic would be to the Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Republic, one of the many hundreds of small peaceful socialist republics which would emerge (I thought) when all the big empires and corporations crumbled. That was about 1950. Well, I soon abandoned the idea. A conjuror’s best trick is to show his audience a moving model of the world as it is with themselves inside of it, and the world is not moving towards greater liberty, equality and fraternity. So I faced the fact that my world model would be a hopless one. I also knew it would be an industrial-west-of-Scotland-petitbourgeois one, but I didn’t think that a disadvantage. If the maker’s mind is prepared, the immediate materials are always suitable.
During my first art school summer holiday I wrote chapter 12 and the mad-vision-and-murder part of chapter 29. My first hero was based on myself. I’d have preferred someone less specialized but mine were the only entrails I could lay hands upon. I worked poor Thaw to death, quite cold-bloodedly, because though based on me he was tougher and more honest, so I hated him. Also, his death gave me a chance to shift him into a wider social context. You are Thaw with the neurotic imagination trimmed off and built in to the furniture of the world you occupy. This makes you much more capable of action and slightly more capable of love.8 The time is now” – the conjuror glanced at his wristwatch, yawned and lay back on the pillows – “the time is 1970 and although the work is far from finished I see it will be disappointing in several ways. It has too many conversations and clergymen, too much asthma, frustration, shadow; not enough countryside, kind women, honest toil. Of course not many writers describe honest toil, apart from Tolstoy and Lawrence on haymaking, Tressel on housebuilding and Archie Hind on clerking and slaughtering. I fear that the men of a healthier age will think my story a gafuffle of grotesquely frivolous parasites, like the creatures of Mrs. Radcliffe, Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. Perhaps my model world is too compressed and lacks the quiet moments of inconsiderable ease which are the sustaining part of the most troubled world. Perhaps I began the work when I was too young. In those days I thought light existed to show things, that space was simply a gap between me and the bodies I feared or desired; now it seems that bodies are the stations from which we travel into space and light itself. Perhaps an illusionist’s main job is to exhaust his restless audience by a show of marvellously convincing squabbles until they see the simple things we really depend upon: the movement of shadow round a globe turning in space, the corruption of life on its way to death and the spurt of love by which it throws a new life clear. Perhaps the best thing I could do is write a story in which adjectives like commonplace and ordinary have the significance which glorious and divine carried in earlier comedies. What do you think?”
“I think you’re trying to make the readers admire your fine way of talking.”
“I’m sorry. But yes. Of course,” said the conjuror huffily. “You should know by now that I have to butter9 them up a bit. I’m like God the Father, you see, and you are my sacrificial Son, and a reader is a Holy Ghost who keeps everything joined together and moving along. It doesn’t matter how much you detest this book I am writing, you can’t escape it before I let you go. But if the readers detest it they can shut it and forget it; you’ll simply vanish and I’ll turn into an ordinary man. We mustn’t let that happen. So I’m taking this opportunity to get all of us agreeing about the end so that we stay together right up to it.”
“You know the end I want and you’re not allowing it,” said Lanark grimly. “Since you and the readers are the absolute power in this world you need only persuade them. My wishes don’t count.”
“That ought to be the case,” said the conjuror, “but unluckily the readers identify with your feelings, not with mine, and if you resent my end too much I am likely to be blamed instead of revered, as I should be. Hence this interview.
And first I want us all to admit that a long life story cannot end happily. Yes, I know that William Blake sang on his deathbed, and that a president of the French Republic died of heart-failure while fornicating on the office sofa,10 and that in 1909 a dental patient in Wumbijee, New South Wales, was struck by lighting after receiving a dose of laughing gas.11 The God of the real world can be believed when such things happen, but no serious entertainer dare conjure them in print. We can fool people in all kinds of elaborate ways, but our most important things must seem likely and the likeliest death is to depart in a ‘fiery pain-chariot’ (as Carlyle put it), or to drift out in a stupefied daze if there’s a doctor handy. But since the dismaying thing about death is loneliness, let us thrill the readers with a description of you ending in company. Let the ending be worldwide, for such a calamity is likely nowadays. Indeed, my main fear is that humanity will perish before it has a chance to enjoy my forecast of the event. It will be a metaphorical account, like Saint John’s, but nobody will doubt what’s happening. Attend!
> When you leave this room you will utterly fail to contact any helpful officials or committees. Tomorrow, when you speak to the assembly, you will be applauded but ignored. You will learn that most other regions are as bad or even worse than your own, but that does not make the leaders want to cooperate: moreover, the council itself is maintaining its existence with great difficulty. Monboddo can offer you nothing but a personal invitation to stay in Provan. You refuse and return to Unthank, where the landscape is tilted at a peculiar angle, rioters are attacking the clock towers and much of the city is in flame. Members of the committee are being lynched, Sludden has fled, you stand with Rima on the height of the Necropolis watching flocks of mouths sweep the streets like the shadows of huge birds, devouring the population as they go. Suddenly there is an earthquake. Suddenly the sea floods the city, pouring down through the mouths into the corridors of council and institute and short-circuiting everything. (That sounds confusing; I haven’t worked out the details yet.) Anyway, your eyes finally close upon the sight of John Knox’s statue – symbol of the tyranny of the mind, symbol of that protracted male erection which can yield to death but not to tenderness – toppling with its column into the waves, which then roll on as they have rolled for. . . a very great period. How’s that for an ending?”
“Bloody rotten,” said Lanark. “I haven’t read as much as you have, I never had time, but when I visited public libraries in my twenties half the science-fiction stories12 had scenes like that in them, usually at the end. Banal world destructions prove nothing but the impoverished minds of those who can think of nothing better.”
The conjuror’s mouth and eyes opened wide and his face grew red. He began speaking in a shrill whisper which swelled to a bellow: “I am not writing science-fiction! Science-fiction stories have no real people in them and all my characters are real, real, real people! I may astound my readers by a dazzling deployment of dramatic metaphors designed to accelerate and compress the action but that is not science, it is magic! Magic! As for my ending being banal, wait ‘til you’re inside it. I warn you my whole imagination has a carefully reined-back catastrophic tendancy: you have no conception of the damage my descriptive powers will wreak when I loose them on a theme like THE END.”
“What about Sandy?” asked Lanark coldly.
“Who’s Sandy?”
“My son.”
The conjuror stared and said, “You have no son.”
“I have a son called Alexander who was born in the cathedral.”
The conjuror, looking confused, grubbed among the papers on his bed and at last held one up, saying, “Impossible, look here. This is a summary of the nine or ten chapters I haven’t written yet. If you read it you will see there’s no time for Rima to have a baby in the cathedral. She goes away too quickly with Sludden.”
“When you get to the cathedral,” said Lanark coldly, “you’ll describe her having a son more quickly still.”
The conjuror looked unhappy. He said, “I’m sorry. Yes, I see my ending becomes unusually bitter for you. A child. How old is he?”
“I don’t know. Your time goes too fast for me to estimate.” After a silence the conjuror said querulously, “I can’t change my overall plan now. Why should I be kinder than my century? The millions of children who’ve been vilely murdered this century is – don’t hit me!”
Lanark had only tensed his muscles but the conjuror slid down the bed and pulled the covers over his head; they sunk until they lay perfectly flat on the mattress. Lanark sighed and dropped his face into his hand. A little voice in the air said, “Promise not to be violent.” Lanark snorted contemptuously. The bedclothes swelled up in a man-shaped lump but the conjuror did not emerge. A muffled voice under the clothes said, “I didn’t need to play that trick. In a single sentence I could have made you my most obsequious admirer, but the reader would have turned against both of us. . . . I wish I could make you like death a little more. It’s a great preserver. Without it the loveliest things change slowly into farce, as you will discover if you insist on having much more life. But I refuse to discuss family matters with you. Take them to Monboddo. Please go away.”
“Soon after I came here,” said Lanark, lifting the briefcase and standing up, “I said talking to you was a waste of time. Was I wrong?”
He walked to the door and heard mumbling under the bedclothes. He said “What?”
“. . . know a black man called Multan. . . ”
“I’ve heard his name. Why?”
“. . . might be useful. Sudden idea. Probably not.” Lanark walked round the painting of the chestnut tree, opened the door and went out.13
1. To have an objection anticipated is no reason for failing to raise.
2. Each of the four authors mentioned above began a large work in medias res, but none of them numbered their divisions out of logical sequence.
3. In 1973, as a result of sponsorship by the poet Edwin Morgan, the author received a grant of £300 from the Scottish Arts Council to help him write his book, but it was never assumed that he would use the money to seek out exotic local colour.
4. Atoms and Print are a false antithesis. Printed paper has an atomic structure like anything else. Words would have been better than Print, since less definably concrete.
5. “Von hinten anzusehen – Die Racker sind doch gar zu appetitlich” is little more than a line. Louis MacNeice omits it from his Faust translation because it reduces the Devil’s dignity. The author’s amazing virulence against Goethe is perhaps a smokescreen to distract attention from what he owes him.
6. The index proves that Lanark is erected upon an infantile foundation of Victorian nursery tales, though the final shape derives from English language fiction printed between the 40s and the 60s of the last century. The hero’s biography a er the death occurs in Wyndham Lewis’ trilogy The Human Age, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and Golding’s Pincher Martin. Modern a erworlds are always infernos, never paradisos, presumably because the modern secular imagination is more capable of debasement than exaltation. In almost every chapter of the book there is a dialogue between the hero (Thaw or Lanark) and a social superior (parent, more experienced friend or prospective employer) about morality, society or art. This is mainly a device to let a self-educated Scot (to whom “the dominie” is the highest form of social life) tell the world what he thinks of it: but the glum flavour of these episodes recalls three books by disappointed socialists which appeared a er the second world war and centred upon what I will call dialogue under threat: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, 1984 by George Orwell, and Barbary Shore by Norman Mailer. Having said this, one is compelled to ask why the “conjuror” introduces an apology for his work with a tedious and brief history of world literature, as though summarizing a great tradition which culminates in himself! Of the eleven great epics mentioned, only one has influenced Lanark. Monboddo’s speech in the last part of Lanark is a dreary parody of the Archangel Michael’s history lecture in the last book of Paradise Lost and fails for the same reason. A property is not always valuable because it is stolen from a rich man. And for this single device thieved (without acknowledgement) from Milton we find a confrontation of fictional character by fictional author from Flann O’Brien; a hero, ignorant of his past, in a subfuse modern Hell, also from Flann O’Brien and, from T. S. Elliot, Nabokov and Flann O’Brien, a parade of irrelevant erudition through grotesquely inflated footnotes.
7. This remark is too ludicrous to require comment here.
8. But the fact remains that the plots of the Thaw and Lanark sections are independent of each other and cemented by typographical contrivances rather than formal necessity. A possible explanation is that the author thinks a heavy book will make a bigger splash than two light ones.
9. In this context to butter up means to flatter. The expression is based upon the pathetic fallacy that because bread tastes sweeter when it is buttered, bread enjoys being buttered.
10. The president in question was Felix Fauré, who di
ed in 1909 upon the conservatory sofa, not office sofa, of the Elysée Palace.
11. The township of Wumbijee is in southern Queensland, not New South Wales, and even at the present moment in time (1976) is too small to support a local dentist. In 1909 it did not exist. The laughing gas incident is therefore probably apocryphal but, even if true, gives a facetious slant to a serious statement of principle. It will leave the readers (whom the author pretends to cherish) uncertain of what to think about his work as a whole.
12. Had Lanark’s cultural equipment been wider, he would have seen that this conclusion owed more to Moby Dick than to science fiction, and more to Lawrence’s essay on Moby Dick than to either.
13. As this “Epilogue” has performed the office of an introduction to the work as a whole (the so-called “Prologue” being no prologue but a separate short story) it is saddening to find the “conjuror” omitting the courtesies appropriate to such an addendum. Mrs. Florence Allan typed and re-typed his manuscripts, o en waiting many months without payment and without complaining. Professor Andrew Sykes gave him free access to professional copying equipment and secretarial help. He received from James Kelman critical advice which enabled him to make smoother prose of the crucial first chapter. Charles Wylde, Peter Cheiene, Jim Hutcheson, Stephanie Wolfe-Murray engaged in extensive lexical activity to ensure that the resulting volume had a surface consistency. And what of the compositors employed by Kingsport Press of Kingsport, Tennessee, to typeset this bloody book. Yet these are only a few of hundreds whose help has not been acknowledged and names not noted.
Two Wee Articles
In 1982 these reviews of a book and two exhibitions of paintings were written for The Sunday Standard. It then seemed that the closure of some Scottish daily papers had left room for a new one, & there were now unemployed journalists available to staff it. This new daily paper lasted less than a year. The galleries showing work reviewed here lasted longer. The Third Eye Centre, founded in 1972 by Tom McGrath, was managed after he left by those who came to have little or no contact with local art, so it failed in 1990. The Collins Gallery of Strathclyde University, was for 40 years a fine exhibition space, closing in 2011 as modern economic policy (higher wages for millionaires) mean only some ancient universitys can afford luxuries like art galleries.
Of Me and Others Page 15
