Читать книгу A Life In Pictures - Alasdair Gray - Страница 9

THESE TWO PICTURES were made according to the rules of the Scottish Department of Education’s Art Inspectorate. The subject for a picture was given along with a piece of paper, then the student ruled round it a half inch margin at the top and sides, then at the foot a three-quarter inch margin in which the student’s name, class and number were written. When I became an art teacher years later I knew another who spent at least half an hour making his class draw these margins with parallel eighth-of-an-inch-apart lines at the foot between which their name, class, school and exact date had to be neatly lettered before their imaginations were told to work freely inside that careful frame. Luckily my own teachers were less inhibitive and only wanted pictures with such margins to show visiting inspectors. I could not take such ordered pictures seriously so filled the space with cartoon figures outlined in pencil, then drawn over with ink, then tinted with watercolours.

The Card Players was given to me as homework. To show the cards occupying the table top in an interesting way, I placed them end to end like dominoes, greatly annoying my father and mother because there was no such card game. I thought my picture made an interesting pattern out of several kinds of people, and if the game they were playing did not exist, such a game could be invented along the lines I had indicated.

Drawing Class , circa 1950, ink and watercolour on paper, 21.5 x 15 cm

The Card Players , 1951, pen and watercolour on paper, 21.5 x 15 cm

At first, half the teaching I got at Whitehill Senior Secondary School struck me as useless because not enjoyable. I was taught Latin because it was an entrance qualification to Glasgow University, and my parents wanted me to go there. The Latin text we used was Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and I loathed both warfare and Caesar. In Maths I appreciated the logical spaces of plane geometry, but when told algebraic equations were rational and irrational, possible and impossible, I stopped struggling to understand symbols grouped under such misleading adjectives. In Science classes I enjoyed experiments like those showing how great heat expanded water into steam and great cold contracted it into ice, but it became a matter of memorizing tables of elements and their combinations. I could only remember what I enjoyed because remembering more was a waste of mind, so with teachers who could not occupy my mind I surreptitiously doodled designs for alternative worlds on the brown paper jackets we had been ordered to put on our schoolbooks. This put me in danger of The Belt, then an often used instrument of torture. The only time it was used on me I nearly fainted, which probably saved me from further punishment. I was never rebellious or cheeky, just firmly absent-minded, so teachers of subjects I disliked accepted my poor exam results though my parents did not. I was freed from organised games and swimming by fits of asthma and eczema, while teachers of History, English and Art thought highly of my classwork. In my last two Whitehill years the head Art teacher, Robert Stuart, let me take any materials I wanted to paint anything I wished, only once murmuring that the examiners would like to see some carefully shaded pencil drawings of plaster casts. I ignored that suggestion. Until supplied with living people to draw, I preferred to paint from imagination.

My love of magic and miracles that made everyday life more exciting inclined me to make pictures of religious subjects, the more far-fetched the better. I also liked the clear outlines and strong colours of early Renaissance artists who painted such things. Mr Stuart’s art room had a lovely row of postcard colour reproductions of these along one wall. I maybe depicted Saint Christopher because he had been the selfish giant my most infantile part wished to be, before he started working for any who needed his help and grew good enough to carry a child who was God. Water, hair, hands and knees were suggested by Japanese prints, and the landscape beyond him by Tolkien’s Hobbit illustrations. The picture works as an overall pattern though the giant’s figure is impossibly grotesque. No teachers complained of me twisting bodies to fit my compositions. But I knew the distortions hid my inability to draw figures well. Egyptian, Greek, Renaissance artists and William Blake had painted vigorous people without much distortion and with no loss of imaginative force. I wanted to gain that glorious ability.

St Christopher , 1951, ink and watercolour on paper, 42 x 30 cm

God obsessed me because, while respecting my dad’s Agnosticism, I wanted the universe – everything – to have one great soul or mind or force that had allowed Jesus, Buddha and many others to show how we could make the world more heavenly, and would at last help us to succeed. The God of Jonah was that sort, by the miracle of the big fish saving the prophet to warn a city of its evil ways, and by the miracle of the gourd teaching him that evil springs from ignorance, and should be forgiven. I probably showed a clean-shaven God with a bald scalp and a lion’s mane of hair behind his ears because nobody else had done so. I should have given Him a better face.

If Jonah’s God was angelically merciful, the God of Exodus was a communal devil ordering refugees from Egypt to invade Palestine and exterminate the natives. Yet Assyrian inscriptions, history books and newspapers show such devils were commanding other nations then, and ever since. I had many arguments with a Christian school friend who found nothing wrong with the Exodus Jehovah and thought people’s evil actions were due to a false yet powerful god, the Devil. I believed the universe could only have one guiding soul with many aspects, and Christians who divided it into a good God and bad Satan, who would both at last have most people tortured for ever in Hell, were setting up the schizophrenic deity shown here.

And the Lord God Prepared a Gourd , 1951, ink and gouache on paper, 20 x 21 cm

Heaven and Hell (We the Saved – Thou the Damned) , 1951, ink and gouache on paper, 27 x 27 cm

In 1950 or ’51 my teachers and parents accepted I would never pass a Latin or Maths exam and enter university, and would probably become a local civil servant because nobody leaving secondary school in Scotland could start earning a living as an artist. This left me over a year to study and paint what I wished. In a history essay on the Industrial Revolution I mentioned Parliamentary Acts that turned common land into private property, driving families out of cottage industries into quickly built factory towns where steam-powered machines allowed cruel exploitation, which happened because wealthy folk strove to get richer fast, and ignored the misery they gave others.

My History teacher said my essay was “too personal” – it passed a moral judgement historians should avoid. We amicably disagreed about this and he suggested I put my views into a lecture for the Whitehill Literary and Debating Society, of which I was a very vocal member. These pictures were made to illustrate that lecture, being shown on a screen by an unwieldy projector called an epidiascope. Starting with The Ice Age and Stone Age man, the story of mankind followed with Keystone Cops rapidity. The worst of city life appeared as Human Sacrifice, the best as Babylonian Priests recording an eclipse, having devised an alphabet and calendar that made writing history possible. Moses on Sinai, leader of wandering Arab tribes who believed in One God, carved out a strong moral law for them on a stone tablet. Greek Democracies achieved greater freedom of new thought, poetry, drama, art and philosophy, which Roman Imperialism partly destroyed and partly (by adoption) prolonged.

A Personal View of History: The Ice Age; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/21 x 15 cm

A Personal View of History: The Stone Age; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/21 x 15 cm

A Personal View of History: Human Sacrifice; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/21 x 15 cm

A Personal View of History: Babylonian Science; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/21 x 15 cm

A Personal View of History: Moses on Sinai: The Moral Law; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/21 x 15 cm

A Personal View of History: Greek Civilization , 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/21 x 15 cm

Between Roman Imperialism (to the left) and the Dark Ages (beneath) came The Sermon on the Mount, with Jesus telling the people of that vast, slave-based empire that every human soul was equally valued by God. He was a moonlit figure on a low pinnacle, preaching to upturned faces and seen from behind. (I have never been able to imagine Jesus from in front.) But I lost that picture. Then came Monastic Learning, The Feudal System, James Watt’s Steam Engine and The Industrial City. The final picture was to be The Triumph of Socialism, showing Riddrie’s Municipal Public Library. I thought this well-planned, well-stocked public library was a triumphant example of local egalitarian democracy. Here, even more than in Whitehill Senior Secondary School, I had been able to give myself exactly the education I wanted, so thought anybody who could read and think would be able to get it there too. Every district of Glasgow and Britain now had such free libraries. A just civilization was finally being established.

A Personal View of History: Roman Imperialism; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/ 21 x 15 cm

A Personal View of History: The Dark Ages; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/ 21 x 15 cm

A Personal View of History: The Monk; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/ 21 x 15 cm

A Personal View of History: The Feudal System; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/ 21 x 15 cm

A Personal View of History: The Engineer; 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/ 21 x 15 cm

A Personal View of History: The Industrial City , 1950, ink and gouache on paper, 15 x 21 cm/ 21 x 15 cm

I could not draw Riddrie Public Library. It held a multitude of books I had found exciting, but the building was part of Riddrie Housing Scheme, the kind of good, pleasant, normal place where I thought everyone should live. But my imagination was not excited by the tree-lined boulevard, the shrubberies and bowling green from which streets radiated between houses with well-kept gardens, and converged on the highest building, which was Riddrie Primary School. It had been planned and almost wholly built shortly before I was born so gave me no solid sense of the past until, when 12, I discovered the Monkland Canal curving round it up the four huge water-stairs of Blackhill Locks. This quarter-mile of huge stone casemates and embankments was slowly turning derelict. If Rome had a modern housing scheme like Riddrie, and a young boy there had no knowledge of the Roman past, he would have felt as I did on suddenly coming upon the Colosseum. This canal proved people here had once done gigantic things, so might do them again – a wonderful idea.

Blackhill Locks , circa 1950, ink and wash on paper, 15 x 21 cm

Monkland Canal, circa 1950, ink and wash on paper, 15 x 21 cm

In the spring of 1952 my mother died soon after her 50th birthday. Most parents kill our infantile faith that we can have anything we want. Mum and Dad left me sure that I could make anything I wanted in words and pictures. I had started imagining a series of pictures called Acts of God, showing miraculous biblical episodes happening in present-day Glasgow, from the Garden of Eden to the Apocalypse. No boy of seventeen could start to make a living by his art in Scotland. My Leaving Certificate passes in Art and English (said Dad and the Whitehill Headmaster after earnest discussions) qualified me to become a paid trainee librarian who might make art his spare-time hobby, and advised me to apply for that. I would have preferred a rich friend to pay me a steady wage to paint anything I liked, and found one fifty years later. In 1952 Glasgow Public Library Department said I could start work with them in the autumn. Meanwhile I went to join a night school class in life drawing, because drawing naked men and women (preferably women) would teach me to paint people who looked less like caricatures. But this training would stop when I became a librarian who would have to work in the evenings.

Theseus and the Minotaur , 1952, scraperboard, 42 x 30 cm

Cartoons from Whitehill Secondary School Magazine , 1950–52

“And now Mrs Claveridge, I will delve into your subconscious mind.”

“It’s all very well for you!”

The Swot (or Beastly Swat) with his mortal foe, the common pupil.

“Don’t be selfish, Geraldine!”

The night school was in Glasgow School of Art, and applicants had to show the Registrar a portfolio of work, so he could reject those who only wanted to look at people without clothes. The Registrar, Mr Barnes, saw pictures shown in this and the last chapter – suggested I enrol as a full-time art student – told my dad that a government bursary could be got to support me. Dad asked what future would the Art School train me for. Mr Barnes hesitated, said most graduates became teachers of art, which was not possible for me as I had not a school certificate in Latin; however, very talented students were sometimes asked to remain in the Art School as teachers, and though he could not yet promise I would be one of those, it was a possibility. So I became a full-time art student. This was the luckiest event of my life, though I became the kind of student none of the Art School staff, including Mr Barnes, could have accepted as a fellow employee.

My wish to be a writer began at primary school, and at Whitehill a teacher of English, Arthur Meikle, encouraged this by making me his assistant as editor of Whitehill School Magazine.

My drawings on the previous page appeared in it, with some equally immature writings. I had also decided to write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scot and (to differentiate it from Joyce’s first novel) would not have it ending with my hero leaving the city of his birth to become an artist, he would stay there until, maddened by a sense of failure, he took his life. I entered Art School determined, in my spare time, to make notes that would help me with that novel, though I had no intention of ending tragically myself. Memorable writers have never done so.

A View of Glasgow Cathedral from the Necropolis , 1952, ink drawing tinted with watercolour on paper, 30 x 21 cm