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Growing Up in the West
Azioni libro
Inizia a leggereLunghezza: 1,054 pagine17 ore
- Editore:
- Open Road Integrated Media
- Pubblicato:
- Jul 1, 2010
- ISBN:
- 9781847674708
- Formato:
- Libro
Descrizione
Four literary works portraying both the gritty beauty and the brutality of Glasgow and western Scotland in the mid-twentieth century.
Includes:
Poor Tom by Edwin Muir
Fernie Brae by J. F. Hendry
From Scenes Like These by Gordon M. Williams
Apprentice by Tom Gallacher
Introduced by Liam McIlvanney, award-winning author of The Quaker, Growing Up in the West presents four very different and memorably vivid accounts of what it was to be young and growing up in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, from the 1930s to the 1960s. Poor Tom tells of a young man’s struggle to come to terms with the slow death of his brother in the city slums of a culturally impoverished Scotland. Fernie Brae celebrates the growth and education of a sensitive youth in a novel reminiscent of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Gordon Williams’s novel From Scenes Like These tells a grimmer story as its young protagonist eventually succumbs to a culture of drink and violence in which the harshness of life on the land sits next to industrial sprawl. Finally, set in the Clydeside shipyards, the wryly observant and humorous style of Apprentice strikes a happier note from the 1960s.
Includes:
Poor Tom by Edwin Muir
Fernie Brae by J. F. Hendry
From Scenes Like These by Gordon M. Williams
Apprentice by Tom Gallacher
Introduced by Liam McIlvanney, award-winning author of The Quaker, Growing Up in the West presents four very different and memorably vivid accounts of what it was to be young and growing up in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, from the 1930s to the 1960s. Poor Tom tells of a young man’s struggle to come to terms with the slow death of his brother in the city slums of a culturally impoverished Scotland. Fernie Brae celebrates the growth and education of a sensitive youth in a novel reminiscent of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Gordon Williams’s novel From Scenes Like These tells a grimmer story as its young protagonist eventually succumbs to a culture of drink and violence in which the harshness of life on the land sits next to industrial sprawl. Finally, set in the Clydeside shipyards, the wryly observant and humorous style of Apprentice strikes a happier note from the 1960s.
Informazioni sul libro
Growing Up in the West
Lunghezza: 1,054 pagine17 ore
Descrizione
Four literary works portraying both the gritty beauty and the brutality of Glasgow and western Scotland in the mid-twentieth century.
Includes:
Poor Tom by Edwin Muir
Fernie Brae by J. F. Hendry
From Scenes Like These by Gordon M. Williams
Apprentice by Tom Gallacher
Introduced by Liam McIlvanney, award-winning author of The Quaker, Growing Up in the West presents four very different and memorably vivid accounts of what it was to be young and growing up in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, from the 1930s to the 1960s. Poor Tom tells of a young man’s struggle to come to terms with the slow death of his brother in the city slums of a culturally impoverished Scotland. Fernie Brae celebrates the growth and education of a sensitive youth in a novel reminiscent of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Gordon Williams’s novel From Scenes Like These tells a grimmer story as its young protagonist eventually succumbs to a culture of drink and violence in which the harshness of life on the land sits next to industrial sprawl. Finally, set in the Clydeside shipyards, the wryly observant and humorous style of Apprentice strikes a happier note from the 1960s.
Includes:
Poor Tom by Edwin Muir
Fernie Brae by J. F. Hendry
From Scenes Like These by Gordon M. Williams
Apprentice by Tom Gallacher
Introduced by Liam McIlvanney, award-winning author of The Quaker, Growing Up in the West presents four very different and memorably vivid accounts of what it was to be young and growing up in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, from the 1930s to the 1960s. Poor Tom tells of a young man’s struggle to come to terms with the slow death of his brother in the city slums of a culturally impoverished Scotland. Fernie Brae celebrates the growth and education of a sensitive youth in a novel reminiscent of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Gordon Williams’s novel From Scenes Like These tells a grimmer story as its young protagonist eventually succumbs to a culture of drink and violence in which the harshness of life on the land sits next to industrial sprawl. Finally, set in the Clydeside shipyards, the wryly observant and humorous style of Apprentice strikes a happier note from the 1960s.
- Editore:
- Open Road Integrated Media
- Pubblicato:
- Jul 1, 2010
- ISBN:
- 9781847674708
- Formato:
- Libro
Informazioni sull'autore
Correlati a Growing Up in the West
Anteprima del libro
Growing Up in the West - Edwin Muir
Growing Up in the West
POOR TOM
Edwin Muir
FERNINE BRAE: A SCOTTISH CHILDHOOD
J. F. Hendry
FROM SCENES LIKE THESE
Gordon M. Williams
APPRENTICE
Tom Gallacher
With an Introduction by
Liam McIlvanney
Contents
Introduction
POOR TOM
FERNIE BRAE: A SCOTTISH CHILDHOOD
FROM SCENES LIKE THESE
APPRENTICE
Introduction
In Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) there is a now infamous scene in which a young man explains to his friend that the inhabitants of Glasgow do not live there imaginatively, since their city – having produced nothing more than ‘a music-hall song and a few bad novels’ – hasn’t been used by artists.1 There are two things that need saying about Duncan Thaw’s thesis. First, it is needlessly pessimistic about the imaginative capacity of ordinary Glaswegians. And, second, it isn’t true. Glasgow had been used by significant artists – from Catherine Carswell and George Blake through to Edward Gaitens and George Friel.2 One aim of the present volume is to press the claims of the neglected tradition that Thaw – and by extension Gray – chooses to belittle. It does so by bringing together four powerful West of Scotland fictions, written for the most part before the appearance of Lanark, and, in one instance at least, written in a style that palpably influenced Gray’s great novel. We will understand Glasgow fiction – indeed, we will understand modern Scottish fiction – better if we stop viewing Lanark solely as a watershed and restore that book to its rightful place in a longer tradition of Scottish urban writing.
The major successes of this tradition – its moments of insight and power – have tended to fall in the perhaps predictable territory of the Bildungsroman. The story of a sensitive youth negotiating the path to maturity in a brutal and intractable environment is a venerable staple of urban fiction, and Glasgow writers have used it widely. Still, a genre is what you make of it, and a number of Glasgow writers have made very significant things indeed from this familiar scenario. We think of Edward Gaitens’s chronicles of a Glasgow-Irish upbringing in Growing Up (1942) and Dance of the Apprentices (1948); of Alan Spence’s vivid limning of a child’s-eye Govan in Its Colours They are Fine (1977) and Stone Garden (1995); and of James Kelman’s masterful studies of boyhood in stories like ‘Fifty Pence’, ‘The wee boy that got killed’ and ‘Joe laughed’. The works collected here form part of this tradition, and together they offer some insight into the business of growing up in the West of Scotland over the first five or six decades of the twentieth century.
Poor Tom (1932) is one of the foundational texts of Scottish urban writing. It inaugurates that vigorous wave of 1930s Glasgow fiction whose highlights include Dot Allan’s Hunger March (1934), George Blake’s The Shipbuilders (1935), James Barke’s Major Operation (1936), the short stories of George Friel and – not least – McArthur and Kingsley Long’s notorious No Mean City (1935). As it is the earliest, so Poor Tom is the best of these books, remarkable both for its psychological acuity and for its pioneering treatment of slum life and socialist politics in the years before World War I. For all that, its initial reception was hardly ecstatic – the first edition may have sold as few as eighty copies3 – and it remains less well known than it ought to be. Perhaps, like Muir’s other novels, it still lies in the shadow of his celebrity as a poet. When a great poet writes a novel we almost desire to see him fail. Success in this second arena seems somehow to diminish his lustre in the first: he can’t have been such a great poet if he is also a competent novelist. In Muir’s case, the position is further complicated by his high standing as a critic, so that we often approach his work with a hankering for hierarchy and with the kind of priorities indicated in the title of Margery McCulloch’s 1993 study; Edwin Muir: Poet, Critic and Novelist. Indeed, Muir the novelist has often to cede the floor not merely to Muir the poet and critic, but to Muir the autobiographer, and there is no doubt that Muir’s novels have suffered from being habitually judged alongside the autobiographical writings, as if the principal merit of his fiction lies in the light it throws on his life.4
All this is to suggest that Muir’s novels haven’t always been approached on their own terms and in their own right. And yet such an approach must be made, for Muir’s fiction is a far from negligible aspect of his achievement as a writer. For a few years on either side of 1930, Muir worked primarily as a novelist, producing three works of fiction in the space of half a decade: The Marionette (1927), the ‘symbolical tragedy’ of a mentally impaired Austrian boy and his grief-stricken father; The Three Brothers (1931), a historical novel of the Scottish Reformation; and Poor Tom (1932).
Poor Tom charts the tensions between two Orkney brothers – Tom and Mansie Manson – who have moved to Glasgow with their mother and cousin following the death of their father. As the novel opens, Tom catches sight of an ex-girlfriend, Helen, arm-in-arm with Mansie, and the brothers’ long estrangement begins. The brothers’ quarrel may have its roots in a deeper antagonism – Tom is a maudlin, splenetic drunk and Mansie a rather priggish convert to socialism; Tom is the family black sheep and Mansie a model of sobriety – but the catalyst is Helen. When Tom, in a stupor of drunken self-pity, stumbles from a tram and injures his brain, Mansie blames himself. Tom’s subsequent illness – he contracts a brain-tumour after his fall – prompts Mansie to scrutinise not just his relationship with Helen (which had been motivated less by affection than by its intoxicating air of transgression) but his own rather under-examined conscience.
It is here – in Mansie’s self-analysis, his halting inventory of his spiritual estate – that the novel finds its true focus. Though not much of a thinker – in some ways, indeed, a fairly shallow character – Mansie has been jolted into pensiveness. Above all, he comes to question his political creed, the rather nebulous and sentimental socialism which has taken the place of his Baptist faith. For Mansie, socialism is a method of ‘diffusing’ his benevolence so as to avoid having to expend it on any particular individual. He combines a generalised sympathy towards the ‘bottom dog’ with a shudder of revulsion at the actual people who ‘sat about collar-less and in their shirt-sleeves, and washed themselves down to the waist at the kitchen sink’. Tom’s illness confronts Mansie with a concrete instance of suffering, a stubbornly unsympathetic victim who – like the noseless beggar sometimes seen around the city – inspires in Mansie a physical dread. In due course, what Mansie comes to realise is that his vaporised, indiscriminate benevolence actually hinders him from giving due attention to his dying brother, and that the socialist heaven on earth – unlike the conventional Christian salvation – has nothing to offer the man who, like Tom, will perish before its inception.
Given its preoccupation with such themes, it is tempting to describe Poor Tom as a novel of ideas, but this would be misleading. Certainly, as Margery McCulloch argues, it is an ‘overtly philosophical’ book,5 but its philosophy concerns emotions and half-formulated perceptions as much as coherent ideas. Muir’s great achievement in the novel is to find a series of compellingly vivid images to convey the often wordless visions of his characters. One can say of Poor Tom what Muir himself says of Kafka’s The Castle: ‘everything happens on a mysterious spiritual plane which was obviously the supreme reality to the author; and yet in a curious way everything is given solidly and concretely’.6
Be that as it may, Muir’s method in Poor Tom has its pitfalls. The fact that, for most of the novel, the two principal characters are not on speaking terms rather limits the opportunity for meaningful dialogue. Partly as a result of this, the novel suffers from a condescendingly intrusive narrator. Critics have complained that Muir is too eager to articulate for Mansie and Tom, that there is too much telling and not enough showing in the novel. This is true, but one could equally argue that the forensic, third-person approach pays significant dividends here; for one thing, it conveys something of the detached, impersonal state of these characters, their curious alienation from their own emotions and actions. The distanced, third-person narrative – viewing the characters from the outside, treating them as laboratory specimens – is not just legitimate but apposite, for this is how the brothers view themselves.
If Tom and Mansie are the protagonists of the novel, the most rounded minor character is the city itself. There is an amplitude, a generosity in Muir’s depiction of Glasgow that distinguishes Poor Tom from the more one-sided and pejorative treatments of the city in Scottish Journey (1935) and An Autobiography (1954). The Mansons may seek to blame their troubles on ‘the corrupting influence of Glasgow’, but it is clear that Tom was a restless drunk and Mansie a shallow prig long before the removal from Orkney. Glasgow’s slum districts – the loathsome Eglinton Street in particular – inspire some classic Muir invective, but even here Muir largely avoids the kind of hysterical rhetoric that marks similar passages in the Autobiography (‘the damned kicking a football in a tenth-rate hell’). He also responds with real enthusiasm to the bustle and vitality of the city, its whist drives and Socialist dances, the fervid debates over Nietzsche and Shaw. Douglas Gifford sees Muir’s treatment of the city as deeply ambivalent, arguing that, in Poor Tom, ‘Glasgow is simultaneously positive and negative’.7 This is true, though it is not clear why Gifford should regard such ambivalence as a ‘weakness’ when, on the contrary, it represents a properly complex and fluid response to a many-sided city. A more damaging inconsistency, perhaps, lies in the characterisation of Mansie who, as P. H. Butter observes, spends much of the book as an amiable dullard, only to rise at sudden junctures into vertiginous flights of philosophical speculation.8
Despite such glitches, however, Poor Tom remains a forceful, cunning book. Perhaps, in addition to its philosophical intensity and its lively treatment of place, what impresses most about the novel is its careful craftsmanship, its meticulous construction. I’m thinking, for instance, of how religious imagery is threaded so subtly through its pages; of how its key incidents are so deftly foreshadowed (when Mansie describes Tom as ‘always stumbling against things that hurt him’ he innocently anticipates the accident with the tram); of how Muir sets up an intricate series of parallels – between, for instance, Mansie’s ‘defenceless clothes’ during a liaison in the woods, and Tom’s ‘crumpled blue trousers’ as the doctor conducts an examination. There is, on top of this, an often brilliant use of symbol: the ‘naked’ iron bedstead that reproaches Mansie when Tom has abandoned their shared bedroom, or the pristine bowler hat that speaks of Mansie’s fastidiousness. This is a novel of poetic reach and intensity, a novel that repays multiple readings and that reinforces our sense of Muir as one of the century’s truly significant Scottish writers.
Fernie Brae: A Scottish Childhood (1947) is the only published novel by James Findlay Hendry, a writer who, partly due to his lengthy residence abroad, is culpably little known in his native land. Born in Glasgow in 1912, and raised mainly in Springburn, Hendry studied modern languages at Glasgow University in the thirties, though he left without taking a degree. After the war, during which he served in the Intelligence Corps, Hendry left Scotland (like the hero of Fernie Brae) and travelled widely in Europe, Africa and North America, working as a professional translator and interpreter, before becoming Professor of Modern Languages at Laurentian University in Ontario. He died in 1986, on the verge of returning to Glasgow for good.9
An eclectic writer, Hendry’s output includes a volume of stories, a biography of Rilke, a handbook for translators and (as editor) The Penguin Book of Scottish Short Stories (1969). Like Muir, however, he was principally a poet. He was the key figure in the wartime New Apocalypse movement, which countered the political poetry of the Auden school with a verse of extravagant and often mystical opacity. A number of Scottish poets – Norman MacCaig, G. S. Fraser and W. S. Graham – also participated, but Hendry was the prime mover, composing the New Apocalypse manifesto and co-editing the movement’s three anthologies: The New Apocalypse (1939); The White Horseman (1940); and The Crown and the Sickle (1943).
While the New Apocalypse was a short-lived affair, some of its ideas and practices – a delight in the visual and the visionary, a preference for the image over the concept, a belief in the regenerative potential of myth, and a deep distrust of the machine age – continued to inform Hendry’s work and are powerfully apparent in Fernie Brae.10 Towards the start of the novel, there is an episode in which the young protagonist gently places a number of caterpillars into the drawer of his mother’s sewing-machine, only to discover the ‘stench of green death’ on the following morning. As well as being a plausible naturalistic incident, this is a classic New Apocalypse symbol: organic potential destroyed by the machine.
In Fernie Brae, Glasgow itself is a machine, a sordid contraption of iron and stone, crushing the life of its trammelled inhabitants. The city is a parody of nature; its chimneys wag like ‘wasted grain’, its trains cross the landscape ‘like black slugs’. The hero, David Macrae, inhabits a tenement district penned in by a cemetery, a grassless park and two vast locomotive works. The irony here – that the locomotive workers rot in their places while the engines they fashion circle the globe – is dryly drawn: ‘Engines from [the Cowlairs works] went to India, China and South America. The majority of the men who built them did not even go down town.’ The city is a penitentiary, its spiked iron railings the symbol of its purpose. From the schoolroom, with its clangorous bell, to the factory, with its pitiless siren, the city is an instrument of subjection, a device for enforcing obedience to ‘the mechanical cackle called civilisation’.
Like Edwin Muir, Hendry views the Industrial Revolution and its concomitant urbanisation as a massive cultural trauma, a catastrophe that menaces Scotland’s very survival as a nation. At the novel’s outset we learn of the process by which ‘the Scots, in the gathering wheels of industry, lost historical vision and perspective’. Cairns Craig is wrong, I think, to perceive in this a Scotland cut off from the process of history.11 Rather, what Hendry depicts is a Scotland dangerously ignorant of the baleful history whose patterns and antagonisms it mechanically repeats. David’s ‘feeling for historical faces’ (he has an aunt who looks like James VI) is repeatedly borne out in a novel whose pages resound with the din of dead battles. The Glasgow district of Battlefield takes its name from the defeat of Mary Queen of Scots by the forces of John Knox. For David Macrae, nearly four hundred years later, the district is ‘still a battlefield’, still governed by a punitive ethic of iron discipline and masculine aggression. The embers of Clan warfare and the spark of Covenanting zealotry still cast an angry glow on a Scotland riven by factional hate. As surely as Stephen Dedalus, David Macrae is struggling to wake from the nightmare of history.
And yet, all is not bitter in Fernie Brae. There is a good deal of humour, as well as vivid and tender vignettes of childhood: street games and old rhymes, fishing trips with a joking uncle. There is an alertness to the city’s unlooked-for beauty – to ‘the liquidity and lability of everything’ after a shower of rain, or the glorious liveries of the brightly coloured trams. What is most impressive here is how Hendry avoids relaxing his vision into a nostalgic soft-focus. Incidents that another writer might have exploited as cheery set-pieces of tender reminiscence – penny soirées in the church hall, visits to the cinema for the children’s matinée – are always refracted through David’s own distinctive consciousness and so retain an edge of strangeness. Crucially, too, Hendry’s fragmented and elliptical style reproduces the often mystified perspective of childhood. Events occur with no apparent cause. The motivation – and even the identity – of certain characters is frequently obscure. In this way, Hendry avoids triteness and sentimentality to fashion a fresh and often disturbing work of fiction.
Fernie Brae is a considerable artistic achievement in its own right, but it is also of interest – as I intimated earlier – for its influence on the greatest of all Glasgow novels, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. While there is no mention of Fernie Brae in Lanark’s ‘Index of Plagiarisms’, the two novels do have a great deal in common. The topography of Fernie Brae – the northside tenements, the cemeteries, the Infirmary, the locomotive works – is substantially that of Lanark. The secondary school which features strongly in both novels is the same one: Whitehill in Dennistoun, though Hendry, in a satirical twist somehow suggestive of Gray, has changed ‘Whitehill’ to ‘Whitehall’! The character of David Macrae – unsporty, awkward with girls and possessed of an innocently subversive honesty (he scandalises a teacher with his assumption ‘that soldiers won medals for killing Germans’) – is almost a prototype of Duncan Thaw. Macrae’s experience at Glasgow University, alienated by a bored staff and a tired curriculum, anticipates Thaw’s frustration at Glasgow School of Art. (Both characters leave without taking their degrees.) On a wider level, the novels share a political outlook. Hendry’s vision of technological civilisation as a monstrous Leviathan squeezing the globe in its bloated tentacles has clear affinities with the satire in Books 3 and 4 of Lanark. Indeed, the young Macrae’s perception of the Bank and the Church as the ‘same institution’ may well anticipate the sinister ‘Institute’ that dominates life in Unthank. Even Thaw’s impromptu seminar on the economic basis of the Italian Renaissance is articulated first by David Macrae. Clearly, the connections between Fernie Brae and Lanark deserve a fuller discussion than I have space for here, but even this cursory treatment does, I hope, reinforce the significance of Fernie Brae and underline its status as ‘one of the few great Scottish novels of the 1940s’.12
Perhaps the bleakest of the four books collected here is Gordon Williams’s cold-eyed Bildungsroman, From Scenes Like These (1968), which was runner-up for the Booker Prize in 1968. A darkness that is more than merely physical is apparent from the opening words:
It was still dark, that Monday in January, when the boy, Dunky Logan, and the man, Blackie McCann, came to feed and water the horses, quarter after seven on a cold Monday morning in January, damn near as chill as an Englishman’s heart, said McCann, stamping his hobnail boots on the stable cobbles.
There is a lot going on in this opening paragraph. First, we encounter two characters who are defined above all by their level of maturity. Dunky Logan is ‘the boy’, and the novel will follow his progress towards what passes for manhood in his society. Among his models here is Blackie McCann, whose nickname reinforces the darkness motif and whose sonorous boots carry a promise of violence. Hard physical labour will be important in this novel, and so too will the atmosphere of casual bigotry, though the bigotry – in a rather deft irony – rebounds onto its perpetrators: there are plenty of chilly hearts in this novel, but none of them belongs to an Englishman.
The novel charts a year in Dunky’s life. Fifteen and fresh from school, he has newly started work at Craig’s farm. As one might expect, given the title’s sardonic nod to Robert Burns, this is no bucolic idyll. Hemmed in by a factory and a lawless council estate, the farm is a ‘sharny old relic hanging on against the creep of the town’. The green Ayrshire of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ seems a world away. There is no rural piety here, and no reverence for nature. There is no organic relationship between man and animal. When old Charlie, the Craigs’ faithful carthorse, has worn himself to the bone after eleven years in harness, he is not put out to pasture; instead – like Boxer in Animal Farm – he is despatched to the knacker’s. The flensing of Charlie – recalling similar passages in Archie Hind’s The Dear Green Place and Edwin Muir’s Autobiography – is one of the most harrowing episodes in the novel.
Not that the human workers are treated with much more charity than Charlie. When Daftie Coll proves surplus to requirements he is paid off with a scant week’s notice – and this after eight years’ service to the Craigs. ‘Farmers can’t afford all this sentimental blether’ is Dunky’s verdict, and neither, it seems, can anyone else. There is a brutal, Hobbesian tenor to life in Dunky’s Kilcaddie. Bickering, back-biting, mutually jealous, the labourers on the farm are like ferrets in a sack. Family life is a bitter joke (‘Family! Don’t make me laugh’ says Dunky’s father), but no one is smiling at the round of flyting and fighting and even incest rendered here. Not even in sex do these characters find communion – the act is either an animal function or a weapon in the class war. Only once – in the maudlin crush of boozers in the bar on Hogmanay – does anything like a community emerge, and even here violence is never more than a jogged elbow away. This is a moral landscape almost devoid of natural human sympathy, and it’s small wonder that the casually ubiquitous rhetoric of damnation (‘MCCANN DAMN YE!’, ‘hellish keen’, ‘Damn and hell, it’s cold’) gradually acquires a more sinister resonance.
According to Isobel Murray and Bob Tait, Dunky Logan is ‘doomed to a dead end’, but the matter may not be as cut and dried as this.13 For much of the novel, Dunky is a borderline character, divided not just between country and town (‘he wasn’t one or the other’), but between the ‘self-mutilating ethic’14 of Kilcaddie and a wider horizon of learning and opportunity. His old teacher’s opinion of Dunky – ‘always the realist’ – is actually wide of the mark, for Dunky is not merely a devourer of adventure stories (he alludes to Stevenson on more than one occasion), but an A-grade dreamer, a kind of Ayrshire Billy Liar. The problem is that, like everyone else in Kilcaddie, he fears and distrusts his own creativity, his dreams and ‘daft notions’, his ‘silly-boy imaginings’.
What Dunky needs – and what Kilcaddie fails to give him – is a socially respectable outlet for his abilities. School is no help here. Nicol, the well-meaning dominie who wants to make Dunky his protégé, is a non-starter as a rôle-model. Desiccated, nit-picking, effete, he merely confirms Dunky’s perception that ‘Education was something you went in for if you weren’t good at anything else’. Moreover, for all his Nationalist radicalism, Nicol remains – like the teachers in Hendry, Kelman and Gray – an instrument of the state, ‘stage one in the disciplinary process’. Nicol aside, there is no-one in Kilcaddie who might foster Dunky’s ambitions. From his friends and relatives he meets nothing but levelling scepticism and brutal derision. A key incident comes when his uncle Charlie discovers Dunky’s secret diary – ‘the chronicle of the life of Duncan Aitchison Logan, plus some information appertaining to his interests’ – and proceeds to read aloud from its ingénu pages. The torment of this incident leads Dunky to a spiteful, self-abnegating pledge: ‘They wanted you to be as thick and dim as they were, so he’d show them he could win the Scottish Cup for ignorance. He’d grow up into a real moronic working-man and balls to them.’
Dunky is true to his word. In the troubling final chapter he turns himself into a caricature, a lumbering parody of lumpen masculinity. The mordant irony here is that, having spent the novel striving to become a ‘real’ man, Dunky winds up as a simulacrum. ‘Like’ is the final chapter’s pivotal word: ‘It was like a man to have mates like them’; ‘It was like a man to stand at the bar’; ‘It was like a man, to have a good laugh about other people’s hard luck’. For all his earnest pondering of the subject, Dunky still doesn’t know what manhood is. He is left with a rô le, a dog-eared script, a ‘collection of poses’. He is still adrift in the novel’s final scene, stood with his drunken mates at an Old Firm match, venting borrowed rage in a long barbaric yawp: ‘He held his hands high above his head and roared and roared until his throat was sore.’ This final image is a grim one, and it makes us question what Dunky has learned in the twelve months covered by the novel. In some respects, the swaggering thug on the slopes of Ibrox is a long way from the nervous boy of the previous year, feeding the horses in the winter dark. From another perspective, however, very little has changed; Dunky is as far as ever from a proper conception of manhood. And one thing is certain: it’s still dark.
In an oeuvre that solicits the epithet ‘uneven’ – it ranges from ‘serious’ literary fiction to detective novels and ‘avowed potboilers’15 – From Scenes Like These stands out as Williams’s triumph. This is Williams at the top of his game. The prose is disciplined, sharp and pungent, and has none of the sub-Joycean flourishes – the frantic punning, the sequinned word-play – that vitiate Walk Don’t Walk (1972) and Big Morning Blues (1974). It’s also a truly courageous novel, one that coldly interrogates the kind of Caledonian machismo in which Williams was often culpably willing to indulge; his interviews are full of windy hard-man rhetoric, and in one he commends his forthcoming football novel – They Used to Play on Grass (1971), co-written with Terry Venables – for showing that ‘not all novelists are faggots living in Hampstead’.16 The best answer to this kind of posturing is the penetrating intelligence of From Scenes Like These, in which the true cost of such witless bigotry is relentlessly and movingly anatomised.
With Tom Gallacher’s Apprentice (1983), we move north from Ayrshire to the ‘precipitous streets of Greenock in the 1950s’. Apprentice is Gallacher’s first work of prose fiction and the opening instalment of the Bill Thompson trilogy, which continues with Journeyman (1984) and Survivor (1985). When his sequence of Clydeside stories made its appearance, Gallacher was already in mid-career as a playwright, his prolific output throughout the seventies and early eighties including radio plays, adaptations of Ibsen and Strindberg and original stage plays like Revival! and Mr Joyce is Leaving Paris. This theatrical ‘apprenticeship’ leaves its mark on Gallacher’s fiction. His faults as well as his virtues are those of a dramatist: his mise-en-scène is effective, his dialogue has polish and point, but his characters can sometimes seem overblown and ‘stagey’, and they are rather too ready to state their case in loudly impressive soliloquies.
The form adopted by Gallacher in Apprentice – the short-story sequence – is one with a distinguished pedigree in Glasgow fiction, having been used with some élan by writers like Gaitens, Friel and Spence. Gallacher’s sequence is tightly constructed: there are five stories, one for each year of the narrator’s apprenticeship, and each centres on a different character, one of the ‘spirited, funny, maddening people’ whom Bill encounters as he serves out his time. We are thus confronted with the paradox that, while Apprentice is the only text in the present volume to feature a first-person narrator, its narrative focus is the most diffuse and decentred of all. Bill Thompson is less concerned with his own ideas and fancies than with observing – and where possible learning from – those around him. He is not simply an apprentice engineer but an ‘apprentice human being’. He is also being inducted into an unfamiliar culture, undergoing an ‘initiation – into adoptive Scottishness’.
For Bill is an outsider, a young Englishman from a moneyed background, the well-spoken product of a minor public school. His father, a consultant engineer, worked his way up from Clyde yards and wants Bill to benefit from a Clydeside apprenticeship before he joins the family firm. Bill is thus, as one of the locals points out, ‘More of a visitor than a real apprentice’, and this external perspective is crucial to the functioning of Apprentice. Neither credulously sympathetic nor antagonistic to the lives he chronicles, Bill maintains a perspective that is not so much objective as disinterested. Through Bill, Gallacher also avoids the danger of narrative condescension. When an anthropological note creeps in – as when Bill describes the habitat and manners of the natives, their standards of hygiene and their courtship rituals, or muses on the ‘foreign language of industrial Scotland’ – this is tempered by Bill’s awareness that his own accent and manners seem equally outlandish to the inhabitants of Greenock.
Bill’s status as a temporary resident, a ‘fanciful outsider who just happened to be passing through’, throws into relief the predicament of the locals, for whom the prospect of escape seems impossibly remote. This note of pessimism is worth stressing, since it is easy to miss amid the bantering exuberance of Gallacher’s Greenockians. Though its touch is light and its tone often quietly celebratory, there is a good deal of darkness in Apprentice. Its concern with what James Kelman calls ‘everyday routine horrors’ – losing a child to the dampness of the slums, lacking the cash to put food on the table – is marked. There are also some disturbing episodes which verge on the histrionic – the matricide of Delia Liddle, for instance, or the madness of Isa Mulvenny, who winds up as a kind of Greenock Miss Havisham, a tenement Mrs Rochester, pining for the husband and the son who have forsaken her. What keeps these scenes on the near side of melodrama is the contrast between the extravagance of the action and the precise, unflustered prose in which it is rendered. Throughout the stories, indeed, we encounter a prose whose almost archaic formality (‘She again essayed the disdainful tossing of her head’) registers Bill’s distance both from the demotic language of those around him and from the raging disorder of their lives.
As befits a fiction centred on a shipyard, the actual processes of labour have their place in Apprentice – as they do throughout Growing Up in the West – but here the focus is resolutely small-scale and intimate: the turning of a valve, the cleaning of an oily sump, the drilling of a brass plate. There are no grandiose panoramas in Apprentice. Gallacher knows that the human frame is not ennobled but diminished when viewed against a backdrop of gargantuan machinery, that the great cranes of the yard render the workers ‘insignificant and identical’. Accordingly, there is no naïve ‘Clydesidism’ here, no earnest hymning of the riveter’s glory, no paeans to the epic stature of the welder. The swelling chords which overwhelm a novel like George Blake’s The Shipbuilders are thankfully absent here. Even where the characters do rise to feats of heroism – as when Andrew Mulvenny risks his life to close down an unmanned rolling mill – we never mistake them for paragons. An unmannerly braggart and a domestic bully, Mulvenny remains incorrigibly human.
While it would be unfair to describe Bill Thompson as a misanthrope, he isn’t quite bursting with affection for humanity at large. He is one of those who are ‘not charmed by their fellow men in the mass, in the crush, or in the queue’. This preference for the discrete individual may help to explain the striking fact that – alone among the books featured here – Apprentice contains no reference to socialist politics, to Clydeside’s culture of labour activism. Apprentice is political in depicting a world of brutalising poverty and exploitation. But the world it depicts is not itself political. There are no firebrands in its yards, there is little sense of class solidarity, and there is almost nothing in the way of political consciousness. We hear some truculent and knee-jerk resentment of Bill as a ‘stuck-up’ Englishman, a born member of the boss class; but no one in these stories believes conditions might be improved except on a personal level, through petty crime, emigration or a ‘college education’.
Thrown back on their own resources, Gallacher’s characters must improvise responses to the chaos in which they move. One might say of these characters, not that they are emptily theatrical, but that they are – for the most part quite knowingly – actors. They hold themselves together in a collapsing world by maintaining a certain persona. From the aristocratic labourer Lord Sweatrag (‘He was acting. He was certainly acting, but with what style’) to the impossibly brash Delia Liddle (whom we first encounter in a theatre), these characters are playing out a rô le. It is a mark of Gallacher’s tact as an artist that he refrains from dictating where such rô les begin and end. Despite its surface crudeness, then, there is decorum in Gallacher’s characterisation, a refusal to claim any definitive knowledge of the person behind the persona. Bill Thompson sets this tone in his rueful preface, when he acknowledges his limits as a narrator, pointing out that his perspective on the people he sketches is partial and contingent, that ‘what was true of them outside my personal intervention and knowledge is missing’. And this, it may be, is the cardinal lesson of the book: that in the business of understanding other people one can never be an adept or an expert, but only and always an apprentice.
*
The great triumphs of Glasgow fiction in the 1980s and beyond – the successes of Kelman and Gray, and the subsequent achievements of Janice Galloway, Jeff Torrington, A. L. Kennedy and Andrew O’ Hagan – have encouraged a drift towards cultural amnesia. While the glories of the now engross both readers and critics, a whole tradition of antecedents and exemplars is slipping out of view. And where earlier urban fiction has received critical notice, it has sometimes been glibly disparaged as gloomy and unadventurous, a drearily homogenous ‘Glasgow school of crisis’.17 It is to be hoped that Growing Up in the West will complicate this picture, testifying as it does to the verve, variety and ingenuity of West of Scotland fiction in the decades prior to the ‘Glasgow Renaissance’. And this – the high literary quality of the works collected here – is the central point to emphasise. If these books have a claim on our attention, if they deserve to be rediscovered and re-read, it is firstly because of their literary merit. They are four finely realised works of fiction. Beyond that, however, they can do us the service of correcting our foreshortened perspective on the literary past, reminding us of a time when the Scottish urban novel itself was growing up in the West.
NOTES
1 Alasdair Gray, Lanark: A Life in 4 Books (London: Picador, 1994), p. 243.
2 On Glasgow fiction generally, see Moira Burgess, Imagine a City: Glasgow in Fiction (Glendaruel: Argyll, 1998), and the same writer’s The Glasgow Novel: A Complete Guide , 3rd edn (Hamilton: The Scottish Library Association, 1999).
3 Margery McCulloch, Edwin Muir: Poet, Critic and Novelist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. 28.
4 Critical studies which treat Muir’s fiction and autobiography together include: P. H. Butter, Edwin Muir (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962); Elgin W. Mellown, Edwin Muir (Boston: Twayne, 1979); and Margery McCulloch, Edwin Muir: Poet, Critic and Novelist .
5 McCulloch, p. 29.
6 Selected Letters of Edwin Muir , ed. by P. H. Butter (London: Hogarth Press, 1974), p. 67.
7 Douglas Gifford, The Dear Green Place? The Novel in the West of Scotland (Glasgow: Third Eye Centre, 1985), p. 7.
8 See Professor Butter’s introduction to the 1982 Paul Harris edition of Poor Tom .
9 Chapman , 52 (Spring 1988), a special Hendry number, contains much useful information on the writer’s life and work. See also the biographical note to J. F. Hendry, Marimarusa (Thurso: Caithness Books, 1978).
10 On the New Apocalypse, see J. F. Hendry, ‘Apocalypse Now: The Image and the Myth’, Chapman , 31 (Winter 1981/ 82), 45–54.
11 Cairns Craig, The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 124–5.
12 Douglas Gifford, ‘A New Diversity’, Books in Scotland , 26 (Winter 1987), 6–14 (p. 14).
13 Isobel Murray and Bob Tait, Ten Modern Scottish Novels (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984), p. 123.
14 Craig, p. 54.
15 Murray and Tait, p. 143.
16 John Lloyd, ‘A Novelist in the Mirror: An Interview with Gordon M. Williams’, Scottish International (August 1971), 22–8 (p. 28).
17 This term was coined by Beat Witschi in his Glasgow Urban Writing and Postmodernism: A Study of Alasdair Gray’s Fiction (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991).
Liam McIlvanney
POOR TOM
Edwin Muir
PART ONE
ONE
WHEN ONE EVENING in the early autumn of 1911 Tom Manson saw his brother Mansie coming out with Helen Williamson through the gate of the Queen’s Park in Glasgow, he stopped as if he had been given a blow on the chest. He told himself that he must be mistaken; but, no, there was no doubt about it; Mansie and Helen were walking along there like old friends. They had not noticed him, but with their faces turned towards each other went off along the park railings towards Pollokshaws Road. Behind his incredulous rage Tom felt honestly alarmed for them; they were so completely unconscious of their danger; they had no idea that they had been seen! But then, as by the single turn of a screw, his fury completely flooded him, sweeping out everything else. He turned and walked down Victoria Road. ‘By God, I’ll get even with him!’ he thought, but no expedient came to his mind, and his anger took another leap upwards.
He pushed open the swing-door of a pub and went up to the counter. The barmaid smiled at him; he could see that all right; but at the same time it was only a distant glassy re-arrangement of her features, so he paid no attention to it but ordered a double Scotch, and when that was swallowed, a second one which he drank more slowly. His anger now quite filled him, yet when he turned into Garvin Street and neared his home it took another leap upwards, lifted him up with it, so that he seemed to be walking partly on the air. Slamming the house door behind him he made at once for the room where he and Mansie slept and began to haul his clothes and belongings to the parlour. The sound of furniture banging brought his mother from the kitchen.
‘What are you doing, Tom?’ she cried. ‘You’ll break the bit sticks o’ furniture if you’re no’ careful.’
‘Leave me alone!’
‘But, lamb, what’s the matter?’
‘If you think I’m going to sleep another night in the same room as that—’ He had to stop, for only one word would come to his tongue, and he could not speak it out before his mother. So in revenge he said: ‘I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m going to ship on the first liner I find.’
‘But what’s wrong, Tom? Tell me what’s wrong?’
‘Leave me alone!’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you leave me alone!’
His mother turned, and her bowed back as she left the room filled him with despair. No, he would never be able to leave this hole! He was chained here. He went through to the bedroom again and carried his bedclothes to the parlour, threw them on the horsehair sofa, and stood staring at them. A key turned in the outside door, and someone stepped into the lobby. He stood rigidly listening. There were voices in the kitchen and then steps in the lobby; but it was his cousin Jean who entered.
‘What idiocy have you been up to now?’ she asked. ‘Do you know that your mother’s crying in the kitchen?’
‘Leave me alone,’ said Tom. But now he spoke in a merely sulky voice.
Jean looked at the bedclothes piled on the sofa: ‘A fine mess you’ve made. Are you going to sleep here?’ Then she turned to him, her voice changing, and asked: ‘Tom, what has happened?’
‘Oh, it’s no business of yours.’ He went across to the window, and looking out said: ‘Well, if you want to know, Mansie’s walking out a lady that used to be a great visitor here at one time. I caught them coming out of the Queen’s Park.’
‘What? Not Helen Williamson?’
‘Yes, Helen Williamson.’
‘But it’s absurd! It’s impossible!’
‘Well, I saw them. Haven’t I told you?’
Jean was silent for a moment, then she asked: ‘Did they see you?’
‘They were too much occupied with each other.’
She stood looking at him: ‘But what’s to be done now?’
‘That’s not my affair. I’m going to ship on a liner tomorrow.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense. You know you’ve got to consider your mother. But I never thought Mansie was such a terrible fool as that!’
‘Well, do you expect me to live here after this?’
Jean stood thinking. Presently she said: ‘Go for a walk. And I’ll make your bed and put this room in some order.’
She began at once, turning her back on him. At the door he said: ‘At any rate, it wasn’t my fault this time.’
‘Who says it was your fault?’ Then she burst out: ‘That woman will be a curse to the both of you! I never liked her.’
‘It’s his fault, not hers.’
‘Do you stick up for her still? But I don’t deny that it’s Mansie’s fault. I’ll have to tell your mother, I suppose.’
Tom walked rapidly up Victoria Road. But when he came to the park gates again his rage met him like a wave and turned him automatically in the opposite direction from the one that Mansie and Helen had taken. With his mother and Jean there he would never be able to get back at that creeper. Velvet-heeled creeper! Scented velvet-heeled creeper! Rows of black, spiked railings spun past him, and he struck at them with his stick. Like a prison, these neat streets and numbered houses and genteel railings. Why had his father hauled him back that time when he had tried to run off to sea? He had actually got to Blackness, was on the boat, tucked away all safe in the forecastle; and then his father came, the very skin at the root of his nose white with anger; and he had got out of the ship again and into the cart, and his father had driven him home to the farm, five hopeless miles. He had been sixteen then – a fellow was far too much at the mercy of everybody at sixteen! – and then his father had had his first heart attack, and that had put a stop to all hope of running away to sea. And when his father died there was his mother to look after, for Mansie had done a bunk to Glasgow long before that: the creeper always knew how to sneak out of things. No wonder he had taken to drink when they had gone to Blackness after his father’s death; he knew every stone in the streets and hated every one of them; but when you got drunk your nose wasn’t brought up against them at every turn; it seemed to give you some hope. Oh, why hadn’t they let him go to sea? They hadn’t known what they were doing.
He was walking now through a wide park dotted with groups of young men in shirt-sleeves playing football. And as if in response to his release from the constriction of the rows of railed houses, he saw himself again, as he had often seen himself, standing at the prow of an ocean-going ship in the solitary morning watch, standing bare-footed and with uncovered head in the wide flapping trousers and blue jersey of a sailor, a cigarette between his lips, a foreign look, the look of one who has seen many lands, on his face. The circle of the sea horizon rose and sank with a slow turning motion like a great coin lazily spinning, and within that ring of danger he was secure, for danger itself was a shield, turning aside all that was equivocal and treacherous and creeping. Yes, that was the life for him; but his father had not known and his mother would never know what a thirst a fellow could have for the sea, so that he seemed to choke on dry land, choke as if a dry clod were rammed down his throat. The sea, or the Wild West with a revolver at your side, some place where you knew your friends and your enemies, knew where you stood.
But suddenly, while he was still in mid-ocean, the turn of Helen’s neck as she looked up at Mansie rose before him. Damn and blast her! It was as if she had given him a blow between the eyes, and he, lying on his back in the gutter, were asking her in pure astonishment why she had done that. And he would have given up everything for her. How good he had felt at that party, the first evening they had met! But he mustn’t think of that. Still, when she wouldn’t tell him her address, by God she had been perfectly right! Better for him if he had never found it out. A damned fool, too, to have wandered round Langside every evening that week in the frost and cold, among all these new streets, great blocks of redstone they were, with genteel railed gardens in front. Of course he hadn’t met her there. But on the Sunday he had got up good and early and gone to the church she attended. Well, he had asked for his medicine pretty thoroughly, right enough. He had looked all round the church, but couldn’t find her. He might have given it up as a bad job then; but no, he had to wait on the pavement when the service was over, and after a while out she came. He had hardly dared to step up to her, the soft fool; he didn’t know at that time that she was the sort that would kiss and canoodle with anybody. But it was all easier than he had expected, far too damned smooth and easy altogether, and she agreed to go for a walk in the park with him without winking an eyelash. Might as well have given him her address at the first go off; but that was like her. And then it was a long time before he plucked up his courage and got it out – a nice sunny day it was, after the frost – but out it came at last: ‘I love you.’ And his voice had trembled: was there ever such a fool? It had made her catch her breath all the same; but then she had replied in that superior way of hers: ‘How can you tell that? You don’t know me.’ But he thought he knew her better than anybody had ever known a girl, and that began it. Yet even then he hadn’t dared to touch her, or to kiss her, for weeks and weeks. Still, that had been the happiest time he had had with her. Better if the thing had always stayed at that stage. For her kisses drove a fellow frantic, and she didn’t seem to know it. Flung herself at you and thought she could go on doing that till the cows came home; kissing and nothing more. Thus far and no farther. And after it was over she would just pat her hat to rights again, looking as superior and genteel as ever, and that was that. How could he have stood it? No wonder he got violent that night in Maxwell Park; he was beyond himself, he couldn’t help it. But then he had crept and crawled before her, licked her boots, told her he was a waster, and promised never to offend again. And after all it wasn’t any use, for she kept as stiff as a poker, never gave him another chance, took no pity on a fellow. And now she was kissing and canoodling with that creeper. By God, if he had guessed that would ever happen he would have known what to do; he would have paid no attention to her objections; that was how to treat tarts of her kind. A proper soft mark he had been.
Now he was among streets again. His anger, which had winged his feet, now fell like the sudden ceasing of a wind. He felt tired; a drink would do him good. He pushed open the swing-door of a pub. As he sat drinking, and the comforting equivocality of alcohol spread through his mind, he gave himself over more and more completely to the thought that he was a waster, as though it were a consoling thought. It didn’t matter what happened to a poor devil like him; let them kiss and canoodle. But then – for even a waster must take some measures of defence against his enemies – he suddenly saw that he must get back before Mansie; it was a point of honour, a point of honour that a creeper mightn’t understand; but it would be indecent if he wasn’t home before Mansie, if he wasn’t sitting at home and waiting for him. So Tom got unsteadily to his feet.
But as he approached Garvin Street a long forgotten memory of his childhood came back to him. A big lout, the son of a neighbouring farmer, had lain in wait for Mansie one evening. Mansie had stood with a terrified look on his face, refusing to fight; but Tom, although he was only a little boy at the time, had flown at Mansie’s tormentor screaming: ‘You’re no’ to hurt Mansie! You’re no’ to hurt Mansie!’ And everybody had laughed, and there had been no fight. And now Mansie had given him a stab in the back. Without provocation. His elder brother that he had always looked up to, that he would have done anything for. ‘By God, I’ll get even with him!’ he said as he went up the stairs, but it was only the repetition of an empty phrase. And when he opened the door he felt so tired that he walked straight through to the parlour – driven out of his very room, by God! – and forlornly went to bed.
After a long and inconclusive debate with his mother in the kitchen, Mansie wearily betook himself to his room. He had denied that there was anything between himself and Helen, denied it as indignantly as if he were speaking the truth; and indeed what he had told her was partly true at least, entirely true in fact if you only counted the time up to the moment when, yielding to a silly impulse – it had become far too much of a habit with him, dash it! – he had stooped down and kissed Helen on the mouth. He knew it was a mistake the minute it was done, knew it as soon as he found her in his arms, knew it while her lips were still clinging to his: a silly goat to have got himself into such a fix for the sake of a moment’s pleasure. But then, whether it was the total abandon with which Helen fell into his arms, as if she had been fatefully poised in a perilous equilibrium that only one touch was needed to destroy, or whether it was the slightly terrifying thought that this was Tom’s girl, whom it would be wicked to trifle with, almost blasphemous to embrace unless one were driven by an irresistible passion that excused everything: all at once they had both become serious, they had looked at each other like conspirators suddenly bound together by a fatal act that they had not foreseen a moment before, revealing them to each other in a flash, so that it would have been useless, even perverse, to pretend any longer. This wasn’t like his other affairs with girls at all! The frightening thought had shot through Mansie’s mind while Helen’s lips were still pressed to his. There was no turning back now. A serious business!
And now, as he lit the gas-jet in his room, he thought again, listening involuntarily for any sound from the parlour where Tom was lying: A serious business! But all the same what he had told his mother was true. Helen had only come to him for help and advice. And besides, it was a dashed shame of Tom to have lain in wait for her, stopping her and speaking to her like that: the poor girl was frightened out of her wits and didn’t know where to turn. Tom should have taken his dismissal like a man. Why, it was two months now since she had told him that it was all over between them! And yet the fellow still went on persecuting her, even stopping her in the street: that was carrying things a bit too far. Still it was dashed unfortunate that Tom had seen them that evening. It was like him, all the same; always stumbling against things that hurt him, always getting himself and other people into trouble. Well, he had only himself to blame; Helen would never have had him back whatever happened.
Mansie glanced round the bedroom. It had a strange naked look. Made a fellow feel quite queer, that empty iron bedstead; something ugly and threatening about it. Things would be dashed uncomfortable in the house now, with Tom in that state of mind. Mansie slowly took off his clothes. Unpleasant going to bed with that thing standing there by the wall as if it were watching you. Wish Bob Ryrie were here to keep a fellow company. Bob would be able to advise one too. He turned his back on the bedstead. A serious business! And he was to see Helen on Saturday afternoon. He almost wished now that he had not fixed up that appointment with her; but there was no drawing back; the damage was done; Tom had seen them, and there would be no use in trying to convince him that—
Putting out the gas, Mansie slipped into bed, carefully avoiding the iron bedstead still reproachfully and threatingly exposing its shameful nakedness to him in the light of the street lamp outside. For a long time he lay awake thinking of Helen and Tom and wishing that Bob Ryrie were there with him. He felt forsaken and unjustly treated, like a child locked as a punishment in an empty room where damaged and disused pieces of furniture are kept. But at last he fell asleep.
TWO
Since there’s no hope, come let us kiss …
DRAYTON
IF TOM MANSON had had the ability to crystallise his vague feelings of betrayal connected with Glasgow he might have said that he was betrayed by a kiss. For it was a kiss, or rather a special kind of kiss, known perhaps only in Puritan countries which have been thoroughly industrialised without being civilised to the point requisite for an industrialised population, that was one of the chief causes of his later misfortunes.
Like all born lovers of freedom Tom had always been irked by a countless number of things which tamer natures adapt themselves to without inconvenience. His father’s farm had irked him because it was stationary, because the seasons followed one another, because the soil had to be ploughed and the harvest reaped; and the little town of Blackness had begun to irk him as soon as he felt that he knew every stone in it. For on the farm he had at least felt the horizon round him wherever he went; but here his sight was bounded by arbitrary walls, and if he got drunk oftener than he should it was partly because then the houses lost their stability, rocked lightly like ships at anchor, and seemed on the point of floating away; and this fluctuating barrier was far more endurable than the rigid walls that sobriety raised about him. Sometimes as he walked home at night after a spree he would kick a particularly massive stone in the wall, at first to convince himself that it was as solid as it looked, and finally in anger at its unresponsiveness. Next day his imprisonment was always harder to bear.
When at last his apprenticeship in the engineering shop was over and he could go to Glasgow, the hugeness of that city became an image of inexhaustible freedom. For a year he was enchanted by the variety and strangeness of Glasgow. Even the unfamiliar conventions pleased him, and he set himself eagerly to acquire them. And although he came from a northern island where people’s speech had still a ballad frankness and young men still climbed in through their sweethearts’ windows at night, he soon learned what words might and might not be addressed to a respectable young Glasgow typist. Like almost everybody, indeed, who, coming from a relatively primitive state of society, seeks to adapt himself to one that is more complex, he made the error of taking the new conventions at their face value and fell from his natural frankness into a fantastic propriety. One thing in particular helped to make his attitude to women excessively correct. A man who has been accustomed to steal to his sweetheart under cover of night insensibly comes to associate love with loosened hair on pillows and matches clandestinely struck, and the sight of a young lady, correctly dressed, walking towards him through the crowd, which he has been watching for the last ten minutes, awakens in him quite a different train of thoughts and conducts him into a world from which there is no bridge to the world of love as he has known it. And that bridge being unthinkable, he comes in time to conceive of the transition to the physical rites of love as a perfectly arbitrary step not provided for by the convention, a blind leap out of one world into another, a violent settlement of a question for which there is no legitimate solution. Tom, in other words, simply could not imagine himself lying in bed with the stylishly dressed girls whom he walked out – at least while he was walking them out; or rather he could not imagine the process which would lead to that consummation: day and night attire having for him almost the force of two absolute conditions – the present in which he was embedded, and the past from which he had been roused for ever. And even when he fell in love with Helen his feelings still remained in this suspended state, and it was only when she granted him a little more than he had reckoned upon that Glasgow and its conventions
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