Alasdair Gray - Old Men in Love

One Saturday morning I visited Renfield Street, a short street of shops in central Glasgow. It joins Sauchiehall Street, Bath Street and Argyll Street to the main bridge over the Clyde, so is always throng with pedestrians and vehicles. It is now almost incredible that second-hand books were once sold from flat-topped wheelbarrows at the corners of blocks on the western side. The spate of private cars must have swept these away in the 1960s, but in my second University year I found on one a tattered Penguin paperback of 19 thcentury verse called Hood to Hardy . Opening it at random I found it had work by poets my teachers had never mentioned, and as I read the street noises seemed to withdraw, leaving me in a silence with these words: 39

This Beauty, this Divinity, this Thought,

This hallowed bower and harvest of delight

Whose roots ethereal seemed to clutch the stars,

Whose amaranths perfumed eternity,

Is fixed in earthly soil enriched with bones

Of used-up workers; fattened with the blood

Of prostitutes, the prime manure; and dressed

With brains of madmen and the broken hearts

Of children. Understand it, you at least

Who toil all day and writhe and groan all night

With roots of luxury, a cancer struck

In every muscle; out of you it is

Cathedrals rise and Heaven blossoms fair;

You are the hidden putrefying source

Of beauty and delight, of leisured hours,

Of passionate loves and high imaginings;

You are the dung that keeps the roses sweet

I did not know what amaranths were or why they perfumed eternity, but that verse shook my intelligence awake by contradicting everything I had been taught about history and poetry at school and university — all I had been officially taught about life and would be taught for years to come. Since that day I have kept finding evidence that this grim view of what we call civilization is strictly true.

I still have and love that tattered copy of the Penguin Hood to Hardy . I bought it for ninepence. The jacket indicated that the price when new had been 2/6, meaning half-a-crown, meaning 30 pence when there were 12 pence in a shilling and 240 in a pound. How queer that old money now seems! Among notes at the end of the book I read that the author had been: John Davidson [1857–1909]. Born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, son of a Dissenting Minister, Schoolmaster in Scotland until 1889 when he settled in London and published various plays and volumes of verse. He died in circumstances that suggested suicide . Barrhead is a small factory town in the Renfrew Hills six or seven miles south of Glasgow. It made lavatory pans, and I think could be reached by tram, before the trams were scrapped in 1963.

Davidson’s verses had been written at the start of the 20 thCentury before two world wars, huge massacres of civilian populations, and continual government-funded escalation of wars and weaponry. I discovered him when these catastrophes had left most British people feeling safe and prosperous, but what I read for myself and have since read confirms Davidson’s tragic view of civilization. It has taken a long while for me to reach the point of asserting it here. Despite great writers working to open folks’ eyes to that truth from the days of Homer and Euripides, the teachers who expounded their work did so with eyes firmly shut. The eye-opening effort is endless. In every age it must be tackled anew, but obviously it could not be tackled within the walls of a university.

I decided to support myself as a school teacher and had a practical and an idealistic reason for teaching in Molendinar Primary. Every pupil in that school except in the final year was my height or less. I also believed that good teachers are more important for primary schools than secondary schools, just as good teachers in secondary schools are more important than those in universities, because the earlier young folk get good schooling, the more it benefits their character. In those days nearly all students had their fees paid (like the armed forces) out of tax-payers’ money, because even Tories thought the nation needed all the well-educated citizens it could get. I was enough of a Socialist to believe that well-educated teachers from prosperous districts should carry their advantages to poorer ones. Most of my pupils were from Blackhill, a Glasgow municipal housing scheme built between the wars but less well-built than the housing schemes of Riddrie and Knightswood where clerks, schoolteachers and lower-paid professional folk were neighbours of skilled workmen. Blackhill was labelled a Slum Clearance Scheme and when high unemployment returned to Britain at the end of the sixties many Blackhill breadwinners lost their jobs and the number of crimes committed there greatly increased. My most difficult pupils came from fatherless homes. The poorest children lived with grandmothers. My first years in teaching made me very unhappy but I did some good. For several years I managed to take some of the poorest on camping holidays and twice got money from a charity that let me rent an H.F. guest house for them, Altshellach, in Arran. But like most idealistic teachers my enthusiasm dwindled so I was happy to become a Headmaster (the least responsible job in any school), happier to take early retirement and hide at last in research for my historic masterpiece.

The flaw in most histories is authors who pretend to be unprejudiced reporters of fact but keep describing the world coming to a good end in their own comfortable state — only Carlyle saw that nations whose only guiding principle was economic competition were preparing a Dark Age blacker than earlier ones. In the 17 thcentury Bishop Bossuet showed history culminating in Louis XIV’s Catholic France; 18 thcentury Gibbon thought it culminated in enlightened Europe; 19 thcentury Hegel in Protestant Prussia, Macaulay in post-Reform Bill England. The Outline of History by H. G. Wells viewed it as an irregular uphill struggle toward a world government of a scienctific, humanitarian kind — a successful 20 thcentury League of Nations. Mark Twain shot down such daftness by pointing out that if the age of the world was represented by the height of the Eiffel Tower, the not-quite million years of human history would correspond to the thickness of the paint on a knob at the very top. He wondered if those who thought the world had been created for mankind, and more especially for themselves, might believe the Eiffel Tower was mainly built to uphold the paint on the topmost knob and concluded, “Reckon they might. I dunno.”

If every history had a prologue describing the education of the writer’s mind, readers would know in advance why some facts dominate the narrative more than others. Dear reader you will soon see how well or badly I lay out mine. Like the Bible it starts in the only way well-educated folk now imagine the beginning.

A sudden endless gas explosion made all the material in this universe. Some parts collided with others, swirling into gassy clumps that got denser and hotter and became radiant globes as they rotated. Big neighbouring globes began turning round each other while smaller ones became satellites of a bigger partner. The lightest materials floated on the surface of the globes, sometimes cooling into floating plates of crust that grew bigger until their edges met, making a surface that only let out light where red-hot or where volcanoes exploded through. The air above this world of ours was of gases no life could breathe: methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapour. The world’s crust thickened. The surface cooled until rain water could lie there without being scalded into steam. At last a sea of water covered the world except where a rocky continent, thicker than the ground under the sea, rose above it near the equator. 40