Alasdair Gray - Old Men in Love

One day in Voltaire and Rousseau’s second-hand bookshop, then at the corner of Gibson Street and Park Road, I found Aubrey Menen’s novel The Abode of Love , about a sect created around 1845 by Henry James Prince, a former Church of England curate. Menen describes Prince as a smart hypocrite who exploits rich dupes with the help of a lawyer. I knew that could not be true, since all who successfully fool many for a long time have first fooled themselves. I searched Glasgow University library’s special collections and found Prince’s published diary, sermons, and some contemporary accounts of him. These told a stranger story than Menen’s.

What have these three in common? Each was too eccentric to be typical of their nations, but their effect on typical people showed how their nation worked. Each was guided by something sensible people reject. Socrates, the most rational and humane of them, had his demon. The painter Filippo Lippi was inspired by Catholic beliefs that sensible Catholics today reject as superstitions. Henry James Prince, a devout, self-lacerating Anglican, strove hard to serve such an impossibly stern idea of God that at last he weakened by believing he and God were identical. The Socratic demon generated European moral philosophy, Filippo Lippi’s Catholicism inspired beautiful paintings, Prince’s faith achieved only a large rest home for a privileged few. Prince will be the least creative of my heroes being nearest today, when local and national governments openly promote private company profits instead of public welfare.

Several weeks ago Mastermind returned my Athenian chapters with comments on my translation of names. Expert, he said, was a good modern equivalent of Sophist, The Darling was suitable for Alcibiades, Olympian and Onionhead for Pericles, except that Athenians likened their prime minister’s head to a sea-onion, a marine growth. He regretted that Heavenly Reason was such a lengthy translation of Nous, Anaxagoras’ nickname, yet could suggest nothing better. And where had I got The Golden Mean for Theramines and High Anxiety for Nicias? I said I had invented these names to indicate their characters. He grunted then told me that buckles for footwear were a medieval invention — Roman helmet straps had them, but sandals were tied with thongs for centuries after Christ. Having got that detail wrong annoys me more than my trouble with Aristophanes’ Clouds. Mastermind had no helpful suggestions about The Clouds.

Between sleep and waking this morning imagined my naked body spread out flat like a landscape beneath me with many wee black circular openings like rabbit holes. I descended and entered one in my chest, then found myself talking to Lorenzo de Medici about the love that led God to make the universe. That dream is a reminder that when writers cannot write something, they should write something else. In the Library I found a Yale Publication on Filippo Lippi’s art with good big colour reproductions. It shows two frescos in which Filippo has a self-portrait. He is not the lean, sharp fellow I imagined but dumpy, with swarthy face and morose expression, more like a plumber or butcher (which his father was) than a womanising Bohemian. This reassures me. Apart from Whistler and poor dear Oscar, only amateur artists play at being narcissistic butterflies. Good artists, until struck down by disease or accident, are hard workers with great staying power.

One Sunday a fortnight ago I was searching Encyclopaedia Britannica for clues to how the Medici funded Brother Filipo’s monastery when the doorbell rang. In walked Yvonne, as suddenly as she walked out in 1999. She did not say how long she will stay this time, or why. Suspect she is estranged from a partner, as steady fuckers are called nowadays, and will stay until reconciled or finds another. Why do none of the women in my life tell me about themselves? (Memo: try to find out). Though she now refuses me full sexual intercourse it is good being back in bed with a woman again, however indifferent or rude to me they are out of bed. When asleep they sometimes snuggle up close and make me feel part of the universe again. Niki used to do that, clinging to my back like a sensual wee papoose or koala bear clinging to its parent. I would stay awake enjoying that for an hour or longer.

Alas, Yvonne now lies in bed as far from me as she can. Distressing. She was the first I ever had sex with easily, pleasantly, without worry. I can only feel her body now by moving carefully against it when she is sound asleep. It is better than no contact at all. Had I been fool enough to marry her she would now certainly be insisting on a separate bed, probably a separate bedroom. But her presence now, though not erotically fulfilling, does me good. When womanless I often lie abed glooming to myself until noon. Now, like when Nell and Nan were alive, I rise promptly at 7 a.m., bath, shave, dress, make breakfast and eat it in kitchen after serving Yvonne hers on a tray in bed. Then four hours of writing in living room, then off to pub lunch at the Rubaiyat or Aragon, then four more hours of research in university library, then homeward by way of Tennants. There I usually discuss my book with Mastermind. (Memo: he says Lisa Jardine’s Worldly Goods, Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches, d’Eramo’s The Pig and the Skyscraper show concordance of art, architecture and successful capitalism.) Then home. Yvonne rings the doorbell some time before midnight, I make supper and to bed we go.

She has never asked for her own key, saying that being in the house alone without me gives her the creeps, perhaps the natural reaction to Victorian décor of someone who, a century ago, could only have been a scullion here.

Before closing time last night I was moving through the crowd toward the door when a man embraced me saying, “My old pal! Do ye still love me pal?”

“I don’t know you,” I said, detaching myself. I thought he was drunk. Outside the pub he started walking beside me saying, “You don’t know me, pal, but I know you. Because of my daughter.”

I saw that he wasn’t drunk but had pretended to be as a way of introducing himself. I asked if she had been to Molendinar Primary. “What you talking about? You know who I mean, pal!” and he tried to nudge me. I asked who he was talking about.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know!” he said, exasperated. I stood still and faced him. We were at the corner of Ruthven Street. The pavement was busy with people who knew me but even without them he would not have seemed physically threatening, being only half a head taller than me with a haggard face, broken nose, and so thin that, from armpits of denim jacket to turned-up cuffs of grubby jeans, his sides were perfectly straight, without bulges indicating where waist, hips, knees were.

“Are you Yvonne’s father?” I asked, determined not to be intimidated. He asked me who the fuck Yvonne was. I said, “Are you Niki’s dad?” He shook his head. I said, “If you are the father of Is, she came to my house with friends over two years ago and ate my biscuits and scones and left without saying a word to me.”