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Two: Childhood Books, 1937–49

WHEN VERY YOUNG I drew every scene with a firm brown, horizontal line at the foot of the paper representing ground, and a blue horizontal line representing the sky at the top, for I thought the outer world had a floor and ceiling like our home. Dad destroyed this primitive model of the universe by explaining that the earth resembled a golf ball turning round the sun, represented by a table lamp. This bored and annoyed without convincing me, but destroyed my notion of the sky as a protective ceiling, because I now saw that if it existed there must be more space above. A religious dad might have told me there was a Heavenly Riddrie above the sky where my dead granny now lived. I remember also drawing a giant who had captured many princesses, but because I could then only draw stick figures with featureless buttons for heads (alright for the giant, not for beautiful women) I drew circles attached by lines to his body. When asked what I was drawing I said, “a miller running to the mill with sacks of corn”. I only recently worked out how a pre-school urban child knew how flour was made. Dad thought all questions a child asked should be honestly answered. On country walks he bored me by using a little pocket book to identify trees by the shape of their leaves, years later telling me he had no interest in botany, and bought the book because I kept asking the names of trees. A story I liked, The Tinderbox, contains three magic dogs who help a poor but ruthless soldier abduct a princess and seize a kingdom. One dog has eyes as big as millstones. I must have asked what millstones were, been told, and thus enabled to invent an innocent fiction to disguise one I was ashamed of. Why was I ashamed of rape fantasy years before knowing of sexual intercourse? Perhaps I identified the princesses with my mother, though she was so much the climate I lived in that I hardly saw her as an individual before her death. When I was ten or eleven I sometimes entertained her in the evening with stories and drawings while she knitted or sewed, but stopped when sexual fantasies invaded my imagination and sexual frustration drove me out at night to walk about in the loneliest places near our home, as I had no girlfriend and was too socially awkward to visit cafés that were then teenagers’ social clubs. But she made me feel women are a safer sex than men, for it was never she who spanked me.

The Harmsworth Universal Encyclopaedia, 1933 edition, 24 x 16 cm

My parents were glad when my vocabulary, knowledge and work pleased others, especially my teachers, but they never praised me for these things in case I grew proud, because pride is liable to downfall. They called attempts to draw attention to myself instead of my work “showing off”, and discouraged that. At social gatherings they liked me to sing ‘The Skye Boat Song’ (my party piece) or recite puerile verses I had written, or take part in political arguments, because that was giving people something, not deliberately drawing them to me. Yet from infancy Mum and Dad clearly wanted me to become very clever, as is shown by a childhood event I cannot recall, but Dad told me about years after.

Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God, Bernard Shaw, 1932, designed & illustrated by John Farleigh, 20 x 13 cm

The Harmsworth Universal Encyclopaedia, special edition , 24 x 16 cm

When I was four or five he had read me Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God, a fable of comparative religions in which a black girl, converted by a missionary to faith in a one-and-only God, searches for him through the African bush. She meets a series of white people, old and young, who claim to be God, or variously describe Him, explain Him or tell her to do without Him. At last she meets Voltaire and Bernard Shaw who persuade her to stop searching for God and do His will by cultivating her own garden – that part of the world we can improve by working with each other through Socialism. He must have read me that book because I had heard God referred to by playmates in our back green, or perhaps on a BBC broadcast, because I knew no adults who talked of Him. Dad said I kept asking him if the next God would be the real one. I must have forgotten all about this because the story bored me as much as his little books of tree identification, unlike The Tinderbox or Snow Queen. His reading must have struck me as a lecture and I wanted to get my knowledge without having it injected. Luckily our house had bookcases where I dug it out by enjoying pictures in a 12-volume Harmsworth Encyclopaedia and The Miracle of Life, a natural and prehistoric history and human anatomy book.

The Miracle of Life, editor Harold Wheeler, Odhams Press Ltd, 1938, 25 x 17 cm

The Jabberwock illustrated by John Tenniel from Alice Through the Looking Glass , Lewis Carroll, 1871, 19 x 12 cm

Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling, illustrations by the author, 1902, 19 x 12 cm

Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling, pictorial initial by the author, 1902, 19 x 12 cm

These enlarged without contradicting the fantasy fictions I enjoyed in other illustrated books. I was delighted to discover how fantastically different our world had been at different times in the past, and that our galaxy contained an unknown number of other worlds where perhaps anything I could imagine might happen. When 11 or 12 I found for myself Dad’s copy of The Adventures of the Black Girl in Search of God and thoroughly enjoyed its story and pictures, for the reading I most enjoyed had both, whether tales of magic or history or science. I loved tales that embraced several genres, like the cartoon adventures of Rupert Bear in Christmas annuals where fairies, dwarves, boy scouts, talking animals, a Chinese conjurer, an eccentric inventor led Rupert wildly astray but always got him home in time for bed. I enjoyed The Dandy and The Beano – the main comics for British under-12s in those days – with such grotesque characters as Big Eggo (an ostrich), Lord Snooty and his Pals, Desperate Dan and Freddy the Fearless Fly. I liked books of wide geographical and historical sweep and do not know when I found many I liked best had been illustrated by their authors – Kipling’s Just So Stories, Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle tales, Thackeray’s Rose and the Ring, Edward Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes and Hendrick van Loon’s Story of Mankind and Home of Mankind. I learned the main shapes of the world’s continents from a toy globe of the world on which I plotted the course of the Nautilus in Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

The Rose and the Ring, William Makepeace Thackeray, illustrations by the author, 1854, 17 x 11 cm

The Rose and the Ring, William Makepeace Thackeray, illustrations by the author, 1854, 17 x 11 cm

Doctor Dolittle in the Moon , Hugh Lofting, frontispiece by the author, 1929, 19.5 x 12.5 cm

The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, Hugh Lofting, illustration & frontispiece by the author, 1923, 19.5 x 12.5 cm

Orthodox Jews, Christians and Mohammedans learn that the universe is a book written by God in which people are good or bad characters. Books taught me that repulsive things and ideas could be made manageable in stories and pictures, though for years I could not re-read Alice Through the Looking Glass without trying not to see the picture of the Jabberwock. Its buck teeth, antennae, feathery claws and three-button waistcoat seemed as horrid as an engraving in Pouchet’s The Universe of a caterpillar being eaten from inside by ichneumon grubs.

The Scene of Our History is Laid Upon A Little Planet; The Medieval World, Hendrick Wilhelm van Loon, 1946, 21 x 13.5 cm

The Scene of Our History is Laid Upon A Little Planet; The Medieval World, Hendrick Wilhelm van Loon, 1946, 21 x 13.5 cm

The Scene of Our History is Laid Upon A Little Planet; A Tower of Babel; Hendrick Wilhelm van Loon, 1946, 21 x 13.5 cm

The Scene of Our History is Laid Upon A Little Planet; Nineveh , Hendrick Wilhelm van Loon, 1946, 21 x 13.5 cm

How Japan Was Made; The Pacific, from The Home of Mankind , Hendrick Wilhelm van Loon, 1949, 21 x 13.5 cm

How Japan Was Made; The Atlantic; from The Home of Mankind , Hendrick Wilhelm van Loon, 1949, 21 x 13.5 cm

How Japan Was Made; The Pacific, from The Home of Mankind , Hendrick Wilhelm van Loon, 1949, 21 x 13.5 cm

Rupert the Bear, circa 1930, Alfred Bestall, 21 x 13.5 cm

I enjoyed escapist fantasies well into my teens, when Dad’s Collected Plays of Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells’ early science fantasies prepared me for more adult reading. Dad subscribed to a book club, The Readers’ Union, so every month a volume arrived by post that I never foresaw or expected but eventually read – Orwell’s 1984, Denton Welsh’s A Voice Through a Cloud, Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, The Best of Hemingway, The Best of James Joyce, Waley’s translations of Classical Chinese poems and that comic epic, Monkey. But the most potent influence was The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Carey. He drew this frontispiece for the Penguin paperback edition – it was not in the first copy I read in the late 1940s. It is shown below because the novel’s atmosphere is in this pub interior – in the sardonic resignation of the hero among his mockers – in the full-bodied barmaid almost lazily lifting a bottle to strike one of them down – and in the moon reflected in the Thames beyond the window.

The Horse’s Mouth , Joyce Cary, author’s frontispiece, 1944, 18 x 11 cm

Set in 1938 it describes the last weeks in the life of an old artist who cares for nothing much but the great painting he tries to make while pennilessly surviving by sponging on friends or robbing a former mistress. Years earlier he had been a successful painter of oil colours, but discovering the work of William Blake moved him to paint big murals of a kind Blake regretted never being commissioned to paint. Gulley Jimson cannot get commissions either since the only folk with faith in his art are a cobbler and postman who think it right to respect outcast intellectuals, and an ugly stammering boy who wants to be an artist. This very funny, high-spirited story persuaded me that making a fine work of art for people who did not want it was the greatest thing I could do. The Horse’s Mouth quoted so much of Blake’s exciting verse that I found in Riddrie Public Library a book containing Songs of Innocence and Experience and the minor prophetic books. In a cheap Everyman edition I found his illustrated Gates of Paradise. In the great Mitchell Public Library by Charing Cross (mostly built with money Andrew Carnegie donated circa 1900) I found facsimiles of his hand-coloured books, with the illustrations and commentary on the Book of Job.

The Gates of Paradise, William Blake, three emblems, 1793, 17 x 10 cm

WHAT IS MAN? The Sun’s Light when he unfolds it Depends on the Organ that beholds it.

At length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell

AGED IGNORANCE Perceptive Organs closed, their Objects close

These were huge boosts to mature free thinking. Blake’s verses and drawings do not amount to a system because he thinks all big systems are political or religious traps used by the rich and powerful to manage others – for their own good of course! Blake’s pictures and writing deal with good and beautiful things while condemning governments and churches that promote mere obedience as a virtue, while using warfare, poverty and hunger to compel those who disagree. Blake, like Robert Burns, never doubted what babies and the wisest people know: what naturally feels good and bad is good and bad, before suppression of these natural feelings perverts them.

The Gates of Paradise , William Blake, four emblems, 1793, 17 x 10 cm

WATER Thou Waterest him with Tears

EARTH He struggles into Life

AIR On Cloudy Doubts & Reasoning Cares

FIRE That ends in endless Strife

I was well aware of my own perversity. Like many children I was obsessed with torture fantasies. American comics (being sold for the first time in Britain) showed a lot of these because the USA publishers’ moral code allowed pictures of glamorous women wearing very little, but forbade showing them in amorous clinches, so their adventures involved physical violence and bondage instead. There is violent action and some bondage in Blake’s art but no perversity, though his men and women, often floating or leaping through space, are usually naked. When fifteen or sixteen I discovered Aubrey Beardsley and loved the way he made innocent fun of mild perversity. He drew naked bodies beautifully, but also enjoyed inventing fantastic costumes for them to dress and undress in. I studied his illustrations along with Blake’s in the Mitchell Library, and failed in attempts to make pictures combining Beardsley’s solid blacks with Blake’s rich colouring.

Infant Joy from Songs of Innocence by William Blake

But The Horse’s Mouth also prepared me for a difficult future. The character of Jimson was partly based on J.D. Fergusson (whom Joyce Carey met in Edinburgh), and partly on Stanley Spencer, but these painters had enough money not to suffer for their art. Jimson was shown wrestling with the penury undergone by Van Gogh and Gauguin. I later learned that Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, though never poor, also suffered terrible defeats. In a late notebook Leonardo asked himself “What has been done? Tell me if anything was ever done?” The statue that would have proved him a sculptor as great as Michelangelo was destroyed by French soldiers using it as target practice and his only mural, The Last Supper, was crumbling when he completed it. In a derelict chapel Jimson finally paints a great mural on the theme of the Creation, persists in painting it as municipal workmen demolish the building. He falls from the scaffolding and, badly injured, is carried away in an ambulance when the adventure of his life (and death, which quickly follows) strikes him as comic. He bursts out laughing and a nun tells him, “You should be praying, not laughing.” He replies, “It’s the same thing, Mother” – a wonderful end to a book and a life.

The Comedy of the Rhinegold , Aubrey Beardsley, title page to unpublished book, circa 1896, 28 x 21 cm

When babies start focusing their eyes all they see is amazing novelty. Wordsworth’s Ode on Intimations of Immortality in Childhood tells how this lovely sense of the world “fades into the light of common day”. All educations must prepare us for pain but some do it too thoroughly. Life becomes daily grind – painful acceptance. I was taught that the universe and evolving life there should be a grand setting for an adventurous future, though like many teenagers I often felt lonely. I shared no sport with other youths, was fascinated by girls but afraid to touch them so never went to dance halls. I had friends but only talked freely to them one at a time, so was not asked to parties. But the chaotic inner feelings and ideas (some splendid, some horrible) that made me socially awkward were, I knew, the essential raw materials of art. I became sure I could paint and write any big thing I imagined, if allowed time to work on it long and hard enough. This confidence in my artistic abilities and contempt for my character or social self – except as a source of raw material – is perhaps frequent among artists, and helps us survive in societies with no use for us.

Note that the pictures I most loved and learned from all had clear outlines. I must have feared or distrusted anything vague or liable to shift and depart. Making a picture is one way of stopping some shapes of things changing – stopping time as long as the picture lasts. It is not strange that over the years I became more and more fascinated by the difficulty of depicting moving water and clouds, and those times of day and weather that Turner (that other great Cockney William) painted so wonderfully well.

This union of confidence in work with a highly interested, but basic contempt for my self is frequent among artists, and perhaps many other folk.

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