Читать книгу Growing Up In The West - John Muir - Страница 4

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, as Margery McCulloch argues, it is an ‘overtly philosophical’ book,5 but its philosophy concerns emotions and half-formulated perceptions as much as coherent ideas. Muir’s great achievement in the novel is to find a series of compellingly vivid images to convey the often wordless visions of his characters. One can say of Poor Tom what Muir himself says of Kafka’s The Castle: ‘everything happens on a mysterious spiritual plane which was obviously the supreme reality to the author; and yet in a curious way everything is given solidly and concretely’.6

Be that as it may, Muir’s method in Poor Tom has its pitfalls. The fact that, for most of the novel, the two principal characters are not on speaking terms rather limits the opportunity for meaningful dialogue. Partly as a result of this, the novel suffers from a condescendingly intrusive narrator. Critics have complained that Muir is too eager to articulate for Mansie and Tom, that there is too much telling and not enough showing in the novel. This is true, but one could equally argue that the forensic, third-person approach pays significant dividends here; for one thing, it conveys something of the detached, impersonal state of these characters, their curious alienation from their own emotions and actions. The distanced, third-person narrative – viewing the characters from the outside, treating them as laboratory specimens – is not just legitimate but apposite, for this is how the brothers view themselves.

If Tom and Mansie are the protagonists of the novel, the most rounded minor character is the city itself. There is an amplitude, a generosity in Muir’s depiction of Glasgow that distinguishes Poor Tom from the more one-sided and pejorative treatments of the city in Scottish Journey (1935) and An Autobiography (1954). The Mansons may seek to blame their troubles on ‘the corrupting influence of Glasgow’, but it is clear that Tom was a restless drunk and Mansie a shallow prig long before the removal from Orkney. Glasgow’s slum districts – the loathsome Eglinton Street in particular – inspire some classic Muir invective, but even here Muir largely avoids the kind of hysterical rhetoric that marks similar passages in the Autobiography (‘the damned kicking a football in a tenth-rate hell’). He also responds with real enthusiasm to the bustle and vitality of the city, its whist drives and Socialist dances, the fervid debates over Nietzsche and Shaw. Douglas Gifford sees Muir’s treatment of the city as deeply ambivalent, arguing that, in Poor Tom, ‘Glasgow is simultaneously positive and negative’.7 This is true, though it is not clear why Gifford should regard such ambivalence as a ‘weakness’ when, on the contrary, it represents a properly complex and fluid response to a many-sided city. A more damaging inconsistency, perhaps, lies in the characterisation of Mansie who, as P. H. Butter observes, spends much of the book as an amiable dullard, only to rise at sudden junctures into vertiginous flights of philosophical speculation.8

Despite such glitches, however, Poor Tom remains a forceful, cunning book. Perhaps, in addition to its philosophical intensity and its lively treatment of place, what impresses most about the novel is its careful craftsmanship, its meticulous construction. I’m thinking, for instance, of how religious imagery is threaded so subtly through its pages; of how its key incidents are so deftly foreshadowed (when Mansie describes Tom as ‘always stumbling against things that hurt him’ he innocently anticipates the accident with the tram); of how Muir sets up an intricate series of parallels – between, for instance, Mansie’s ‘defenceless clothes’ during a liaison in the woods, and Tom’s ‘crumpled blue trousers’ as the doctor conducts an examination. There is, on top of this, an often brilliant use of symbol: the ‘naked’ iron bedstead that reproaches Mansie when Tom has abandoned their shared bedroom, or the pristine bowler hat that speaks of Mansie’s fastidiousness. This is a novel of poetic reach and intensity, a novel that repays multiple readings and that reinforces our sense of Muir as one of the century’s truly significant Scottish writers.

Fernie Brae: A Scottish Childhood (1947) is the only published novel by James Findlay Hendry, a writer who, partly due to his lengthy residence abroad, is culpably little known in his native land. Born in Glasgow in 1912, and raised mainly in Springburn, Hendry studied modern languages at Glasgow University in the thirties, though he left without taking a degree. After the war, during which he served in the Intelligence Corps, Hendry left Scotland (like the hero of Fernie Brae) and travelled widely in Europe, Africa and North America, working as a professional translator and interpreter, before becoming Professor of Modern Languages at Laurentian University in Ontario. He died in 1986, on the verge of returning to Glasgow for good.9

An eclectic writer, Hendry’s output includes a volume of stories, a biography of Rilke, a handbook for translators and (as editor) The Penguin Book of Scottish Short Stories (1969). Like Muir, however, he was principally a poet. He was the key figure in the wartime New Apocalypse movement, which countered the political poetry of the Auden school with a verse of extravagant and often mystical opacity. A number of Scottish poets – Norman MacCaig, G. S. Fraser and W. S. Graham – also participated, but Hendry was the prime mover, composing the New Apocalypse manifesto and co-editing the movement’s three anthologies: The New Apocalypse (1939); The White Horseman (1940); and The Crown and the Sickle (1943).

While the New Apocalypse was a short-lived affair, some of its ideas and practices – a delight in the visual and the visionary, a preference for the image over the concept, a belief in the regenerative potential of myth, and a deep distrust of the machine age – continued to inform Hendry’s work and are powerfully apparent in Fernie Brae.10 Towards the start of the novel, there is an episode in which the young protagonist gently places a number of caterpillars into the drawer of his mother’s sewing-machine, only to discover the ‘stench of green death’ on the following morning. As well as being a plausible naturalistic incident, this is a classic New Apocalypse symbol: organic potential destroyed by the machine.

In Fernie Brae, Glasgow itself is a machine, a sordid contraption of iron and stone, crushing the life of its trammelled inhabitants. The city is a parody of nature; its chimneys wag like ‘wasted grain’, its trains cross the landscape ‘like black slugs’. The hero, David Macrae, inhabits a tenement district penned in by a cemetery, a grassless park and two vast locomotive works. The irony here – that the locomotive workers rot in their places while the engines they fashion circle the globe – is dryly drawn: ‘Engines from [the Cowlairs works] went to India, China and South America. The majority of the men who built them did not even go down town.’ The city is a penitentiary, its spiked iron railings the symbol of its purpose. From the schoolroom, with its clangorous bell, to the factory, with its pitiless siren, the city is an instrument of subjection, a device for enforcing obedience to ‘the mechanical cackle called civilisation’.

Like Edwin Muir, Hendry views the Industrial Revolution and its concomitant urbanisation as a massive cultural trauma, a catastrophe that menaces Scotland’s very survival as a nation. At the novel’s outset we learn of the process by which ‘the Scots, in the gathering wheels of industry, lost historical vision and perspective’. Cairns Craig is wrong, I think, to perceive in this a Scotland cut off from the process of history.11 Rather, what Hendry depicts is a Scotland dangerously ignorant of the baleful history whose patterns and antagonisms it mechanically repeats. David’s ‘feeling for historical faces’ (he has an aunt who looks like James VI) is repeatedly borne out in a novel whose pages resound with the din of dead battles. The Glasgow district of Battlefield takes its name from the defeat of Mary Queen of Scots by the forces of John Knox. For David Macrae, nearly four hundred years later, the district is ‘still a battlefield’, still governed by a punitive ethic of iron discipline and masculine aggression. The embers of Clan warfare and the spark of Covenanting zealotry still cast an angry glow on a Scotland riven by factional hate. As surely as Stephen Dedalus, David Macrae is struggling to wake from the nightmare of history.

And yet, all is not bitter in Fernie Brae. There is a good deal of humour, as well as vivid and tender vignettes of childhood: street games and old rhymes, fishing trips with a joking uncle. There is an alertness to the city’s unlooked-for beauty – to ‘the liquidity and lability of everything’ after a shower of rain, or the glorious liveries of the brightly coloured trams. What is most impressive here is how Hendry avoids relaxing his vision into a nostalgic soft-focus. Incidents that another writer might have exploited as cheery set-pieces of tender reminiscence – penny soirées in the church hall, visits to the cinema for the children’s matinée – are always refracted through David’s own distinctive consciousness and so retain an edge of strangeness. Crucially, too, Hendry’s fragmented and elliptical style reproduces the often mystified perspective of childhood. Events occur with no apparent cause. The motivation – and even the identity – of certain characters is frequently obscure. In this way, Hendry avoids triteness and sentimentality to fashion a fresh and often disturbing work of fiction.

Fernie Brae is a considerable artistic achievement in its own right, but it is also of interest – as I intimated earlier – for its influence on the greatest of all Glasgow novels, Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. While there is no mention of Fernie Brae in Lanark’s ‘Index of Plagiarisms’, the two novels do have a great deal in common. The topography of Fernie Brae – the northside tenements, the cemeteries, the Infirmary, the locomotive works – is substantially that of Lanark. The secondary school which features strongly in both novels is the same one: Whitehill in Dennistoun, though Hendry, in a satirical twist somehow suggestive of Gray, has changed ‘Whitehill’ to ‘Whitehall’! The character of David Macrae – unsporty, awkward with girls and possessed of an innocently subversive honesty (he scandalises a teacher with his assumption ‘that soldiers won medals for killing Germans’) – is almost a prototype of Duncan Thaw. Macrae’s experience at Glasgow University, alienated by a bored staff and a tired curriculum, anticipates Thaw’s frustration at Glasgow School of Art. (Both characters leave without taking their degrees.) On a wider level, the novels share a political outlook. Hendry’s vision of technological civilisation as a monstrous Leviathan squeezing the globe in its bloated tentacles has clear affinities with the satire in Books 3 and 4 of Lanark. Indeed, the young Macrae’s perception of the Bank and the Church as the ‘same institution’ may well anticipate the sinister ‘Institute’ that dominates life in Unthank. Even Thaw’s impromptu seminar on the economic basis of the Italian Renaissance is articulated first by David Macrae. Clearly, the connections between Fernie Brae and Lanark deserve a fuller discussion than I have space for here, but even this cursory treatment does, I hope, reinforce the significance of Fernie Brae and underline its status as ‘one of the few great Scottish novels of the 1940s’.12

Perhaps the bleakest of the four books collected here is Gordon Williams’s cold-eyed Bildungsroman, From Scenes Like These (1968), which was runner-up for the Booker Prize in 1968. A darkness that is more than merely physical is apparent from the opening words:

It was still dark, that Monday in January, when the boy, Dunky Logan, and the man, Blackie McCann, came to feed and water the horses, quarter after seven on a cold Monday morning in January, damn near as chill as an Englishman’s heart, said McCann, stamping his hobnail boots on the stable cobbles.

There is a lot going on in this opening paragraph. First, we encounter two characters who are defined above all by their level of maturity. Dunky Logan is ‘the boy’, and the novel will follow his progress towards what passes for manhood in his society. Among his models here is Blackie McCann, whose nickname reinforces the darkness motif and whose sonorous boots carry a promise of violence. Hard physical labour will be important in this novel, and so too will the atmosphere of casual bigotry, though the bigotry – in a rather deft irony – rebounds onto its perpetrators: there are plenty of chilly hearts in this novel, but none of them belongs to an Englishman.

The novel charts a year in Dunky’s life. Fifteen and fresh from school, he has newly started work at Craig’s farm. As one might expect, given the title’s sardonic nod to Robert Burns, this is no bucolic idyll. Hemmed in by a factory and a lawless council estate, the farm is a ‘sharny old relic hanging on against the creep of the town’. The green Ayrshire of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ seems a world away. There is no rural piety here, and no reverence for nature. There is no organic relationship between man and animal. When old Charlie, the Craigs’ faithful carthorse, has worn himself to the bone after eleven years in harness, he is not put out to pasture; instead – like Boxer in Animal Farm – he is despatched to the knacker’s. The flensing of Charlie – recalling similar passages in Archie Hind’s The Dear Green Place and Edwin Muir’s Autobiography – is one of the most harrowing episodes in the novel.

Not that the human workers are treated with much more charity than Charlie. When Daftie Coll proves surplus to requirements he is paid off with a scant week’s notice – and this after eight years’ service to the Craigs. ‘Farmers can’t afford all this sentimental blether’ is Dunky’s verdict, and neither, it seems, can anyone else. There is a brutal, Hobbesian tenor to life in Dunky’s Kilcaddie. Bickering, back-biting, mutually jealous, the labourers on the farm are like ferrets in a sack. Family life is a bitter joke (‘Family! Don’t make me laugh’ says Dunky’s father), but no one is smiling at the round of flyting and fighting and even incest rendered here. Not even in sex do these characters find communion – the act is either an animal function or a weapon in the class war. Only once – in the maudlin crush of boozers in the bar on Hogmanay – does anything like a community emerge, and even here violence is never more than a jogged elbow away. This is a moral landscape almost devoid of natural human sympathy, and it’s small wonder that the casually ubiquitous rhetoric of damnation (‘MCCANN DAMN YE!’, ‘hellish keen’, ‘Damn and hell, it’s cold’) gradually acquires a more sinister resonance.

According to Isobel Murray and Bob Tait, Dunky Logan is ‘doomed to a dead end’, but the matter may not be as cut and dried as this.13 For much of the novel, Dunky is a borderline character, divided not just between country and town (‘he wasn’t one or the other’), but between the ‘self-mutilating ethic’14 of Kilcaddie and a wider horizon of learning and opportunity. His old teacher’s opinion of Dunky – ‘always the realist’ – is actually wide of the mark, for Dunky is not merely a devourer of adventure stories (he alludes to Stevenson on more than one occasion), but an A-grade dreamer, a kind of Ayrshire Billy Liar. The problem is that, like everyone else in Kilcaddie, he fears and distrusts his own creativity, his dreams and ‘daft notions’, his ‘silly-boy imaginings’.

What Dunky needs – and what Kilcaddie fails to give him – is a socially respectable outlet for his abilities. School is no help here. Nicol, the well-meaning dominie who wants to make Dunky his protégé, is a non-starter as a rôle-model. Desiccated, nit-picking, effete, he merely confirms Dunky’s perception that ‘Education was something you went in for if you weren’t good at anything else’. Moreover, for all his Nationalist radicalism, Nicol remains – like the teachers in Hendry, Kelman and Gray – an instrument of the state, ‘stage one in the disciplinary process’. Nicol aside, there is no-one in Kilcaddie who might foster Dunky’s ambitions. From his friends and relatives he meets nothing but levelling scepticism and brutal derision. A key incident comes when his uncle Charlie discovers Dunky’s secret diary – ‘the chronicle of the life of Duncan Aitchison Logan, plus some information appertaining to his interests’ – and proceeds to read aloud from its ingénu pages. The torment of this incident leads Dunky to a spiteful, self-abnegating pledge: ‘They wanted you to be as thick and dim as they were, so he’d show them he could win the Scottish Cup for ignorance. He’d grow up into a real moronic working-man and balls to them.’

Dunky is true to his word. In the troubling final chapter he turns himself into a caricature, a lumbering parody of lumpen masculinity. The mordant irony here is that, having spent the novel striving to become a ‘real’ man, Dunky winds up as a simulacrum. ‘Like’ is the final chapter’s pivotal word: ‘It was like a man to have mates like them’; ‘It was like a man to stand at the bar’; ‘It was like a man, to have a good laugh about other people’s hard luck’. For all his earnest pondering of the subject, Dunky still doesn’t know what manhood is. He is left with a rô le, a dog-eared script, a ‘collection of poses’. He is still adrift in the novel’s final scene, stood with his drunken mates at an Old Firm match, venting borrowed rage in a long barbaric yawp: ‘He held his hands high above his head and roared and roared until his throat was sore.’ This final image is a grim one, and it makes us question what Dunky has learned in the twelve months covered by the novel. In some respects, the swaggering thug on the slopes of Ibrox is a long way from the nervous boy of the previous year, feeding the horses in the winter dark. From another perspective, however, very little has changed; Dunky is as far as ever from a proper conception of manhood. And one thing is certain: it’s still dark.

In an oeuvre that solicits the epithet ‘uneven’ – it ranges from ‘serious’ literary fiction to detective novels and ‘avowed potboilers’15 – From Scenes Like These stands out as Williams’s triumph. This is Williams at the top of his game. The prose is disciplined, sharp and pungent, and has none of the sub-Joycean flourishes – the frantic punning, the sequinned word-play – that vitiate Walk Don’t Walk (1972) and Big Morning Blues (1974). It’s also a truly courageous novel, one that coldly interrogates the kind of Caledonian machismo in which Williams was often culpably willing to indulge; his interviews are full of windy hard-man rhetoric, and in one he commends his forthcoming football novel – They Used to Play on Grass (1971), co-written with Terry Venables – for showing that ‘not all novelists are faggots living in Hampstead’.16 The best answer to this kind of posturing is the penetrating intelligence of From Scenes Like These, in which the true cost of such witless bigotry is relentlessly and movingly anatomised.

With Tom Gallacher’s Apprentice (1983), we move north from Ayrshire to the ‘precipitous streets of Greenock in the 1950s’. Apprentice is Gallacher’s first work of prose fiction and the opening instalment of the Bill Thompson trilogy, which continues with Journeyman (1984) and Survivor (1985). When his sequence of Clydeside stories made its appearance, Gallacher was already in mid-career as a playwright, his prolific output throughout the seventies and early eighties including radio plays, adaptations of Ibsen and Strindberg and original stage plays like Revival! and Mr Joyce is Leaving Paris. This theatrical ‘apprenticeship’ leaves its mark on Gallacher’s fiction. His faults as well as his virtues are those of a dramatist: his mise-en-scène is effective, his dialogue has polish and point, but his characters can sometimes seem overblown and ‘stagey’, and they are rather too ready to state their case in loudly impressive soliloquies.

The form adopted by Gallacher in Apprentice – the short-story sequence – is one with a distinguished pedigree in Glasgow fiction, having been used with some élan by writers like Gaitens, Friel and Spence. Gallacher’s sequence is tightly constructed: there are five stories, one for each year of the narrator’s apprenticeship, and each centres on a different character, one of the ‘spirited, funny, maddening people’ whom Bill encounters as he serves out his time. We are thus confronted with the paradox that, while Apprentice is the only text in the present volume to feature a first-person narrator, its narrative focus is the most diffuse and decentred of all. Bill Thompson is less concerned with his own ideas and fancies than with observing – and where possible learning from – those around him. He is not simply an apprentice engineer but an ‘apprentice human being’. He is also being inducted into an unfamiliar culture, undergoing an ‘initiation – into adoptive Scottishness’.

For Bill is an outsider, a young Englishman from a moneyed background, the well-spoken product of a minor public school. His father, a consultant engineer, worked his way up from Clyde yards and wants Bill to benefit from a Clydeside apprenticeship before he joins the family firm. Bill is thus, as one of the locals points out, ‘More of a visitor than a real apprentice’, and this external perspective is crucial to the functioning of Apprentice. Neither credulously sympathetic nor antagonistic to the lives he chronicles, Bill maintains a perspective that is not so much objective as disinterested. Through Bill, Gallacher also avoids the danger of narrative condescension. When an anthropological note creeps in – as when Bill describes the habitat and manners of the natives, their standards of hygiene and their courtship rituals, or muses on the ‘foreign language of industrial Scotland’ – this is tempered by Bill’s awareness that his own accent and manners seem equally outlandish to the inhabitants of Greenock.

Bill’s status as a temporary resident, a ‘fanciful outsider who just happened to be passing through’, throws into relief the predicament of the locals, for whom the prospect of escape seems impossibly remote. This note of pessimism is worth stressing, since it is easy to miss amid the bantering exuberance of Gallacher’s Greenockians. Though its touch is light and its tone often quietly celebratory, there is a good deal of darkness in Apprentice. Its concern with what James Kelman calls ‘everyday routine horrors’ – losing a child to the dampness of the slums, lacking the cash to put food on the table – is marked. There are also some disturbing episodes which verge on the histrionic – the matricide of Delia Liddle, for instance, or the madness of Isa Mulvenny, who winds up as a kind of Greenock Miss Havisham, a tenement Mrs Rochester, pining for the husband and the son who have forsaken her. What keeps these scenes on the near side of melodrama is the contrast between the extravagance of the action and the precise, unflustered prose in which it is rendered. Throughout the stories, indeed, we encounter a prose whose almost archaic formality (‘She again essayed the disdainful tossing of her head’) registers Bill’s distance both from the demotic language of those around him and from the raging disorder of their lives.

As befits a fiction centred on a shipyard, the actual processes of labour have their place in Apprentice – as they do throughout Growing Up in the West – but here the focus is resolutely small-scale and intimate: the turning of a valve, the cleaning of an oily sump, the drilling of a brass plate. There are no grandiose panoramas in Apprentice. Gallacher knows that the human frame is not ennobled but diminished when viewed against a backdrop of gargantuan machinery, that the great cranes of the yard render the workers ‘insignificant and identical’. Accordingly, there is no naïve ‘Clydesidism’ here, no earnest hymning of the riveter’s glory, no paeans to the epic stature of the welder. The swelling chords which overwhelm a novel like George Blake’s The Shipbuilders are thankfully absent here. Even where the characters do rise to feats of heroism – as when Andrew Mulvenny risks his life to close down an unmanned rolling mill – we never mistake them for paragons. An unmannerly braggart and a domestic bully, Mulvenny remains incorrigibly human.

While it would be unfair to describe Bill Thompson as a misanthrope, he isn’t quite bursting with affection for humanity at large. He is one of those who are ‘not charmed by their fellow men in the mass, in the crush, or in the queue’. This preference for the discrete individual may help to explain the striking fact that – alone among the books featured here – Apprentice contains no reference to socialist politics, to Clydeside’s culture of labour activism. Apprentice is political in depicting a world of brutalising poverty and exploitation. But the world it depicts is not itself political. There are no firebrands in its yards, there is little sense of class solidarity, and there is almost nothing in the way of political consciousness. We hear some truculent and knee-jerk resentment of Bill as a ‘stuck-up’ Englishman, a born member of the boss class; but no one in these stories believes conditions might be improved except on a personal level, through petty crime, emigration or a ‘college education’.

Thrown back on their own resources, Gallacher’s characters must improvise responses to the chaos in which they move. One might say of these characters, not that they are emptily theatrical, but that they are – for the most part quite knowingly – actors. They hold themselves together in a collapsing world by maintaining a certain persona. From the aristocratic labourer Lord Sweatrag (‘He was acting. He was certainly acting, but with what style’) to the impossibly brash Delia Liddle (whom we first encounter in a theatre), these characters are playing out a rô le. It is a mark of Gallacher’s tact as an artist that he refrains from dictating where such rô les begin and end. Despite its surface crudeness, then, there is decorum in Gallacher’s characterisation, a refusal to claim any definitive knowledge of the person behind the persona. Bill Thompson sets this tone in his rueful preface, when he acknowledges his limits as a narrator, pointing out that his perspective on the people he sketches is partial and contingent, that ‘what was true of them outside my personal intervention and knowledge is missing’. And this, it may be, is the cardinal lesson of the book: that in the business of understanding other people one can never be an adept or an expert, but only and always an apprentice.

*

The great triumphs of Glasgow fiction in the 1980s and beyond – the successes of Kelman and Gray, and the subsequent achievements of Janice Galloway, Jeff Torrington, A. L. Kennedy and Andrew O’ Hagan – have encouraged a drift towards cultural amnesia. While the glories of the now engross both readers and critics, a whole tradition of antecedents and exemplars is slipping out of view. And where earlier urban fiction has received critical notice, it has sometimes been glibly disparaged as gloomy and unadventurous, a drearily homogenous ‘Glasgow school of crisis’.17 It is to be hoped that Growing Up in the West will complicate this picture, testifying as it does to the verve, variety and ingenuity of West of Scotland fiction in the decades prior to the ‘Glasgow Renaissance’. And this – the high literary quality of the works collected here – is the central point to emphasise. If these books have a claim on our attention, if they deserve to be rediscovered and re-read, it is firstly because of their literary merit. They are four finely realised works of fiction. Beyond that, however, they can do us the service of correcting our foreshortened perspective on the literary past, reminding us of a time when the Scottish urban novel itself was growing up in the West.