Growing Up In The West. John Muir

Growing Up In The West - John Muir


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      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

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       With an Introduction by

      Liam McIlvanney

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      Contents

       Introduction

      POOR TOM

      FERNIE BRAE: A SCOTTISH CHILDHOOD

      FROM SCENES LIKE THESE

      APPRENTICE

       Introduction

      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.

      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.


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