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Foreword

MY LAST BOOK WAS CALLED A Life in Pictures. This one might have been called A Life in Prose. It contains reminiscences and essays written between 1952 and 2014 about my own works and those of-friends. Marginal and footnotes give dates of writing or publication. The earliest piece is a speculative essay, apart from which the rest describe what I think facts, though readers will dismiss some as opinions. Three, though mainly factual, diverge into fiction for reasons the notes also explain. My life as a professional author connects most of them. I have improved a few sentences so that my younger self sometimes seems to write better than he did, but no other changes suggest I was wiser in those days than I am now.

I thought this book would turn out to be a ragbag of interesting scraps. I now think it has the unity of a struggle for a confident culture, a struggle shared with a few who became good friends and thousands I have never met. Every nation has periods of lesser and greater assurance. When I was twenty-one the Scotland I knew was confident in the many goods it made and exported, but many educated people had very little confidence in Scottish visual and literary art, not because we lacked them, but because our education had stopped us seeing them. I believed all good books by Scots must be published in London and would fail if not praised by English book reviewers; also that artists wishing to live by their art had better follow the example of Labour politicians and go to London. This explains the querulous tone of many early essays. I felt my nation was treated as a province, even by many who lived here. I wanted that to stop.

Being twelve years old when the 2nd World War ended, I belonged to the first generation to benefit by the welfare state in both healthcare and education. Unlike post-Thatcher children we had grants to attend art schools and universities without getting into debt, and even shift from one to another. From these pre-Thatcher graduates came poets, writers and playwrights who are now part of a very loose literary and artistic establishment at home in their own land, which may again become a nation in 2015.

A Socialist like my father, I loved Riddrie Public Library because it let anyone, but especially me, become a citizen in the world’s Republic of Letters. I referred so much to it in these essays that I have deleted most and other repetitions, filling the hole

Alison Lumsden, my sharpest critic, says my habit of forestalling antagonistic remarks in forewords¹ and postscripts² is a cowardly ploy intended to baffle honest criticism. She is right. This ploy will get my work forgotten sooner rather than later.

1. Such as this.

2. See here.