Growing Up In The West. John Muir

      Contents

       Introduction

      POOR TOM

      FERNIE BRAE: A SCOTTISH CHILDHOOD

      FROM SCENES LIKE THESE

      APPRENTICE

       Introduction

In Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) there is a now infamous scene in which a young man explains to his friend that the inhabitants of Glasgow do not live there imaginatively, since their city – having produced nothing more than ‘a music-hall song and a few bad novels’ – hasn’t been used by artists.1 There are two things that need saying about Duncan Thaw’s thesis. First, it is needlessly pessimistic about the imaginative capacity of ordinary Glaswegians. And, second, it isn’t true. Glasgow had been used by significant artists – from Catherine Carswell and George Blake through to Edward Gaitens and George Friel.2 One aim of the present volume is to press the claims of the neglected tradition that Thaw – and by extension Gray – chooses to belittle. It does so by bringing together four powerful West of Scotland fictions, written for the most part before the appearance of Lanark, and, in one instance at least, written in a style that palpably influenced Gray’s great novel. We will understand Glasgow fiction – indeed, we will understand modern Scottish fiction – better if we stop viewing Lanark solely as a watershed and restore that book to its rightful place in a longer tradition of Scottish urban writing.

      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.

Poor Tom (1932) is one of the foundational texts of Scottish urban writing. It inaugurates that vigorous wave of 1930s Glasgow fiction whose highlights include Dot Allan’s Hunger March (1934), George Blake’s The Shipbuilders (1935), James Barke’s Major Operation (1936), the short stories of George Friel and – not least – McArthur and Kingsley Long’s notorious No Mean City (1935). As it is the earliest, so Poor Tom is the best of these books, remarkable both for its psychological acuity and for its pioneering treatment of slum life and socialist politics in the years before World War I. For all that, its initial reception was hardly ecstatic – the first edition may have sold as few as eighty copies3 – and it remains less well known than it ought to be. Perhaps, like Muir’s other novels, it still lies in the shadow of his celebrity as a poet. When a great poet writes a novel we almost desire to see him fail. Success in this second arena seems somehow to diminish his lustre in the first: he can’t have been such a great poet if he is also a competent novelist. In Muir’s case, the position is further complicated by his high standing as a critic, so that we often approach his work with a hankering for hierarchy and with the kind of priorities indicated in the title of Margery McCulloch’s 1993 study; Edwin Muir: Poet, Critic and Novelist. Indeed, Muir the novelist has often to cede the floor not merely to Muir the poet and critic, but to Muir the autobiographer, and there is no doubt that Muir’s novels have suffered from being habitually judged alongside the autobiographical writings, as if the principal merit of his fiction lies in the light it throws on his life.4

      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.

Given its preoccupation with such themes, it is tempting to describe Poor Tom as a novel of ideas, but this would be misleading. Certainly,