Alasdair Gray - Old Men in Love

Home by 2.30 where Niki served me with afternoon tea as she has done regularly since I lost my temper last week. For the first time she had got the amount of sugar and milk in my cup exactly right. I praised her. She seemed pleased. Could I train her to become, not a mistress or wife, but a helpmeet who shops, cooks, serves nice meals? A companion who will help make my descent through senility to death a comfortable passage after I have published my masterpiece and enjoy the fame and fortune it cannot fail to bring?

My lawyer friend phoned this morning and, her voice harsh with indignation, told me BBC television reports of Blair’s Glasgow speech yesterday were inter-cut with views of the protestors outside the building, thus suggesting he had delivered his speech as he had planned, instead of fleeing before the protestants arrived. 23 I told her my book would correct that account of our march at the very end, unless I lived to see Blair arrested for his lie that Iraq is nearly ready to atom bomb Britain in 45 minutes.

Am confirmed in my new plan for the book by Nicolai Gogol’s life who, like Burns and Walter Scott and me, was first inspired by the songs and ballads of his homeland, the Ukraine. He spent years attempting a history showing how different it was from the rest of Russia because Ukrainian Cossacks had kept Islam out of Christian Europe in the south when Polish Catholics were doing the same thing in the north. But he was no provincial! His Taras Bulba, fruit of that historical research, owes much to a Russian translation of the Odyssey. His Dead Souls, the first great Russian novel, owes much to his reading of Don Quixote and The Pickwick Papers. He tried to complete that vision of Russia (as a Hell of grotesque souls) with a Heavenly modern conclusion in which his fraudulent hero is redeemed by a good Russian prince and Orthodox Christianity. He failed, but with his friend Pushkin, generated all that is great, unique and worth world-wide attention in Russian literature between the failure of the December revolution of 1825 and the Soviet revolution in the 1920s. My book will fail to present a vision of self-governing Scotland becoming a unique example of good Socialism, but may manage to show why it could and should be. Forget fame and fortune. I recently read a story 24 about young American students asked, as a psychological test, to say what inanimate thing they would like to be. A black girl upsets everyone by saying, “a revolver”. I asked myself that question and immediately answered “a molecule”. Why? Molecules are invisible, anonymous, invulnerable and essential. My book will almost certainly appear after my death when I will be invisible and invincible. Start it tomorrow.

My character was shaped by two gentle, unmarried women who mothered me from infancy, providing all I needed and almost all I wanted without a word of reproof or complaint. If I am not now monstrously selfish it is because I loved them as dearly as they loved me, so tried to save them from the trouble a dependent, growing boy might cause elderly women. This was usually easy as I only felt perfectly safe and happy at home with them. The unsatisfactory parts of my world were outside it. Each Sunday we attended services in the church where a grandfather who died years before my birth had been the first Minister of God. I enjoyed the hymns, had no objection to prayers but would have found the sermons boring had Nell, the youngest aunt, not fed me a chocolate cream or liquorice allsort or peppermint humbug whenever I fidgeted. Too much sugar rots the teeth so I was only given sweets during Sunday sermons, blissfully sucking while my eyes dreamily explored the great interior like a spacious lantern. The church had been modelled on the gothic Sainte-Chapelle in Paris so there was no pillar or gallery to prevent a clear view of the coved ceiling and tall stained glass windows. I was too young to consciously enjoy its beauty but now believe it enlarged my soul like all truly good things we meet when young.

But I stopped enjoying the Sunday schools held by a church elder in a comfortable part of the undercroft. She was a retired school teacher as kind as my aunts. She told us simple Bible stories chiefly about Jesus at first, but at the age of seven started teaching the early history of mankind and God’s chosen people with straight readings from Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Samuel and Kings . She omitted dull begat chapters and sexually explicit ones like Abraham’s fraudulent prostitution of his wife in Genesis chapters 12 and 20, but did not censor the genocidal wars by which the children of Israel replaced the original inhabitants of Palestine. I thought the Lord God who ordered the Israelites to “ smite them, and utterly destroy them; and make no pact with them, nor show mercy unto them ” was cruel and unfair. I said so. The teacher was a gentle soul. She told me the war was not a fight for land between Jews and those earlier settlers, the Ammonites, Midianites, Canaanites and Philistines; it was a “life-and-death struggle between truth and falsehood for the cultural development of God’s people”. 25I asked what that meant. Becoming a little flustered she said God needed to order the slaughter of men, women and children who did not believe in Him, so that the Jews had a homeland where His son Jesus, Prince of Peace, could be born to preach the religion of peace for everyone. I did not then know that Christian nations had been as warlike as pagan ones, and had used the Old Testament for centuries after the crucifixion to justify the invasion and massacre of foreigners. But the teacher knew this, so skipped from the spread of Christianity by Saint Paul to the recent victory over Fascism by Britain and the U.S.A. She did not mention the essential help nations got from the atheist U.S.S.R. but said the German defeat was a Christian victory and had established a United Nations Organisation that would oppose warfare from now onward. Yet this explanation did not stop me thinking the Israelites had been cruel, greedy and unfair. I told my aunts so and Nell looked at Nan in a slightly guilty way. After a brief pause Nan her elder sister said firmly, “You are right to think that. Most of what the Bible says Jesus said should be believed. Some of the rest was written by poets as good as any you will find in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and some by propagandists as bad as any in Nazi Germany. But the Bible has so changed world history that nobody will understand that if they know nothing about it. But you need not attend Sunday school if you do not wish.” So I stopped going. Nan also said, “Nell and I are faithful members of the Church of Scotland because, though agnostics like most religious people nowadays, we are also old maids ruled by force of habits drilled into us by a rigorous parent. You need not come with us to church if you dislike it.” But I liked hymns, stained glass, also the sweets which I only stopped sucking when I lost my taste for sherry. I attended church with my aunts until they were bedridden.