Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray
and Bill Paterson could easily sound like one of them. “But your narrator is supposed to be the Poet Laureate of a great empire!” said the producer, who obviously thought it irrelevant that Britain now had none, so had the story recorded in London by an English actor. That broadcast won the approval of Rodger Scruton, a Conservative critic who thought the story a satire on Communism. A friend who later attended an international literary conference told me he had heard a Chinese and Japanese scholar discuss which of their nations my empire resembled. I told him I thought it was very much like Britain.
Childhood Reading
These are answers to a questionnaire sent to secondary schools, either by the Department of Education for Scotland, or else the Glasgow part of it, to find how much the pupils had read of well respected authors. The questionnaire, headed Whitehill Senior Secondary School Report on Reading may even have been devised by the teachers of English (Mr Meikle among them) who gave them out. I made this the start of an essay Robert Crawford asked me to write for a new journal, Scotlands, he was editing. The University of Edinburgh was the publisher. It later became Scottish Studies Review. First printed in 1994. The article here is a wee bit enlarged. Robert had also been Mr Meikle’s pupil when both were at Hutcheson’s, the Grammar School, as good 2ndary schools were once called.
THE FOLLOWING REPORT on my reading was made near the end of my 16th year in September 1951, and retained by my English teacher, Mr Meikle, whose widow gave it to me after his death in the spring of 1993.
It was written with a steel-nibbed pen dipped in a squat glass bottle (if I wrote at home) or (if I wrote at school) into an inkwell – a truncated cone of glazed white earthenware less than two inches high, whose wide end was closed by a glazed white earthenware disc, slightly more than an inch in diameter, a disc with a hole in the centre to admit the pencil and a projecting tip all round which let it hang smugly in the circular hole cut for it in our desk tops. In 1951 ball point pens had been commercially marketed for several years, but most British schools forbade their use because it would reduce the quality of our handwriting. In those days most employers still preferred clerks whose penwork was clear and elegant, so schools encouraged it. In 1951 my writing, like nowadays, was very clear but not at all elegant, having changed little since I learned to draw words when four or five. The letters are distinctly shaped and connected, but the loops of a, d, g and q are almost circular, with oval ascending loops, as are the ascending and descending loops of f, g, h, j, k and l. All ascenders and descenders are short. I could never slope the vertical strokes slightly to the right as we were urged, so my vertical strokes are exactly so, or incline as much to the left as the right.
I am almost certain the manuscript I gave to Mr Meikle was copied out at home from an earlier, messier attempt. I was as prone then to afterthoughts as I am still, and though the spaces left for book titles after the authors names were all the same size, the titles written in are all written without a blot or correction.
SCOTT – None.
JANE AUSTEN – None.
DICKENS – The Christmas Books. Barnaby Rudge. Little Dorritt. Oliver Twist. David Copperfield. The Pickwick Papers.
THACKERAY – The Rose and The Ring.
CHARLOTTE BRONTE – Jane Eyre.
EMILY BRONTE – Wuthering Heights.
GEORGE BORROW – Lavengro. Romany Rye.
MEREDITH – The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.
R. L. STEVENSON – Treasure Island. Kidnapped. Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. The Master of Ballantrae. A Child’s Garden of Verses. Virginibus Pueresque.
TROLLOPE – None.
HARDY – None.
BARRIE – None.
KIPLING – Just So Stories. The Jungle Books. Puck of Pooks Hill. Stalky and Co. Seven Seas.
CONAN DOYLE – The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes. A Study in Scarlett. The Sign of Four. The Lost World. The Poison Belt.
CONRAD – Youth. Casper Ruiz. The Shadow Line. Under Western Eyes. Chance. Last Essays.
SHAW – The Black Girl in Search of God. (Here follows the titles of the 43 plays Shaw had published in 1934, and I had read in a book my father owned, to which I added:) Scraps and Shavings. An Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Capitalism, Socialism and Fascism.
H. G. WELLS – The Time Machine. Collected Short Stories. The Invisible Man. The War of the Worlds. The First Men on the Moon. The Island of Dr. Moreau. The Food of the Gods. The History of Mr. Polly. Tono Bungay. The King Who Was a King. A Study of History. An Experiment in Autobiography. The Shape of Things to Come.
JACK LONDON – None.
SIEGFRIED SASSOON – None.
H. V. MORTON – None.
WODEHOUSE – None.
BENNETT – The Card.
BUCHAN – The Thirty Nine Steps. Prester John. The Powerhouse. Greenmantle.
HUGH WALPOLE – Mr Perrin and Mr Trail. Jeremy.
NEIL MUNRO – The Daft Days.
OTHER AUTHORS AND TITLES – Voltaire’s Candide. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Sentimental Journey. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Fielding’s History of Jonathon Wilde The Great. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Hugo’s Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Mrs. Gaskell’s Cranford. Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass. Kingsley’s Waterbabies, unabridged. Huxley’s Brave New World, Ape and Essence. Orwell’s Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Apuleius’ The Golden Ass. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People. Edward Lear’s The Complete Nonsense. Hendrick Van Loon’s Home of Mankind, Story of Mankind, Arts of Mankind, Liberation of Mankind. Goethe’s Faust Part I.
The above list was not wholly truthful as I wanted my teachers to think me a greater scholar than I was – a greater scholar than they were. I had read only a little beyond the start of Barnaby Rudge and Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. I stopped reading the first because I am impatient of man-made mysteries and Dickens’ 18th century convinced me less than Conrad’s. I recoiled from the second because I hated to read of lives ruined early by treachery. Nor had I read Arnold Bennett’s The Card. I had heard a radio talk on it with dramatized excerpts, and knew I could answer questions on it that would satisfy any adult.
Nor had I read more than a few pages of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Capitalism etcetera. To this day I cannot thoroughly read a work of politics, sociology or philosophy which does not describe particular instances. Shaw’s treatise may have had many, but his title made me doubt that. But I had read enough to grasp and believe that the more just society is, the more essential to it is everyone’s work, and the more equal are their incomes, which I still believe. And I had only dipped into a few chapters of Well’s Study of History in the Pelican paperback version.
Explaining how, and where, and when I came to read the other books would take at least a year, so I will comment on very few. The complete plays of Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen stood on the middle shelf of a bookcase in my parents, beside Carlyle’s French Revolution, Macauleys Essays, The History of the Working Classes in Scotland and Our Noble Families by Tom Johnson, a Thinkers library volume called Humanities Gain from Unbelief, an anthropology of extracts from atheists called Lift Up Your Heads, a large blue-grey bound volume with The Miracle of Life stamped in gold on the spine. This contained essays on The Dawn of Life, What Evolution Means, Life