Of Me and Others , livre ebook

OF ME AND OTHERS
Born in 1934, Alasdair Gray graduated in design and mural painting from the Glasgow School of Art. Since 1981, when Lanark was published by Canongate, he authored, designed and illustrated seven novels, several books of short stories, a collection of his stage, radio and TV plays and a book of his visual art, A Life in Pictures . In November 2019, he received a Lifetime Achievement award by the Saltire Society. He died in December 2019, aged eighty-five.
OF ME AND OTHERS
by Alasdair Gray

for Morag, Mora, Andrew, Bert, Katriona, Tracy, Maff, Jim, Libby and Alexandra in Scotland England and the U.S.A.

CANONGATE BOOKS EDINBURGH 2019
biblio notice
This revised edition published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Alasdair Gray 2014, 2019
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of Creative Scotland towards the publication of this book

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 520 2 eISBN 978 1 78689 521 9
an epigraph

Everyone over middle age
regrets some loss that ageing brings.
My principal regret is this:
I’ve never tackled handy things.
Before King Louis lost his head
his hobby was repairing locks.
Byron, despite a crippled foot,
wrote epics yet could swim and box.
Sir Thomas Browne, Bill Carlos Bill,
were medical practitioners.
The Reverend Sydney Smith had skill
to doctor his parishioners.
One soldier wrote great words for tunes. 1
One housewife writes tremendous books. 2
One postman publishes cartoons. 3
One mural painter welds and cooks. 4
One sweeper of streets can etch and paint. 5
One banker played the bagpipes well. 6
One fisherman became a saint who
holds the keys of Heaven and Hell. 7
Ruskin swept stairs and weeded plots.
D. H. Lawrence scrubbed the floors.
Count Tolstoy emptied chamber pots.
Why do I flinch from household chores?
Frosts’s farming was not infamous.
Melville and Conrad sailed the sea.
James Kelman drove an omnibus.
No honest toil excuses me.
1. Hamish Henderson
2. Agnes Owens
3. Stuart Murray
4. Nichol Wheatley
5. Alan Richardson
6. Former manager of the Glasgow Byres Road Clydesdale Bank
7. Peter
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD
1987 Middle Age Self Portrait
2012 ANOTHER NOT SCOTLAND
1951 –2013 CHILDHOOD READING
1993 Childhood Writing and MR MEIKLE
1952 Two Whitehill School Magazine Essays
1957 EPIC PAINTING: Art School Thesis
1959 A REPORT TO THE TRUSTEES
1960 WORLD OF 4 TO 7 : Teaching College Thesis
1964 APOLOGY FOR MY RECENT DEATH
1969 INSTEAD OF AN APOLOGY
1973 Of Bill Skinner, Small Thistle
1974 A Retrospective Catalogue – Introduction
1975 Of Gable-End Murals – A Letter
1975 NEW LANARK CRAFT COMMUNITY
1977 WRITERS GROUPS and A Resident’s Report
1978 Of Joan Ure: Playwright
1981 LANARK : Epilogue
1982 TWO WEE ARTICLES
1983 Modest Proposal for Bypassing a Predicament
1984 1982 JANINE : Epilogue
1985 Of Alasdair Taylor, Painter
1985 Of R. D. Laing
1986 Of Scottie Wilson
1986 Five Glasgow Artists Show : Catalogue Essay
1986 Of John Glashan – A Letter
1988 Of Ian Hamilton Finlay – A Letter
1989 A Radio Talk on Allegory for Scottish Schools
1990 Of Elspeth King – A Friend Unfairly Treated
1990 MCGROTTY AND LUDMILLA : Epilogue
1990 Preface to J. Withers’ Glasgow Archipelago
1990 SOMETHING LEATHER : Epilogue
1990 Of Pierre Lavalle – Catalogue Introduction
1991 Of Andrew Sykes – Short Story Postscript
1991 THE FALL OF KELVIN WALKER : Introduction
1992 POOR THINGS : Acknowledgements, Prologue
1993 Of Anthony Burgess – Obituary
1994 Of Jack Vettriano
1995 LEAN TALES : Postscript
1996 Of Bill MacLellan – Obituary
1997 WORKING LEGS : How This Play Got Written
1999 Preface to Books of Jonah, Micah & Nahum
2000 THE BOOK OF PREFACES : Postscript
2000 16 OCCASIONAL VERSES : Endnotes
2003 FIFTEENTH FEBRUARY
2004 Of Susan Boyd – Obituary
2004 THE DECLARATION OF CALTON HILL
2004 Introduction to The Knuckle End
2005 Of Philip Hobsbaum – Obituary
2006 SELF PORTRAITURE
2006 New Kelvingrove
2007 LONDON WON’T LET US
2008 Of Archie Hind – Dear Green Place Epilogue
2008 FLECK : Postscript
2009 OLD MEN IN LOVE : Epilogue by S. Workman
2009 An Upper Clyde Falls Mural
2012 Hillhead Subway Station Mural
2013 Of John Connolly – Obituary
2013 Of Will Self
2013 Of Bill Hamilton
2018 HELL: Dante’s Trilogy Part 1 : Foreword
POSTSCRIPT
Foreword
M Y 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 forewords 1 and postscripts 2 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 .
Middle Age Self Portrait
Saltire Society was founded in 1936 by people who wished to see, “not just a revivals of the arts of the past, but a renewal of the life that made them, such as achieved by Scots in the 18th century.” It publicized new buildings, good restorations of old ones, while issuing pamphlets on Scots history, law, philosophy, famous writers, usually dead. In the 1980s it started printing autobiographical booklets about modern authors. MacDiarmid & Goodsir Smith were dead, so theirs were edited out of their personal accounts still in print. Naomi Mitchison and I wrote our own. Mine, published in 1988, was last of a series which should have continued while any Scots knew they had a literature.
O N MONDAY, 18TH MAY, 1987, 10.30 PM. My birth certificate says I am 52 years, 167 days, 40 minutes old. My passport says I am 1.74 metres or 5 feet 9! inches tall. According to the scales in the lavatory I weigh 13 stones and 7 pounds in my socks, semmit, underpants, bath robe, national health spectacles and false upper teeth: from all of which a doctor will deduce I am not in the best of health. I have the lean, muscular legs and small bum of the brisk pedestrian but the bulging paunch of the heavy drinker, the fleshy shoulders hunched too near the ears of the asthmatic with bronchial tendencies. The neck is thick; hands and feet and genitals small; the chin strong and double with the underside not yet grossly pendulous; the moustache pale sand colour; the straight nose survives from the years when I was thin all over; the eyes are small and sunken with blue-grey irises; the brow straight and not deeply lined; the hair of the scalp is fading from nondescript brown to nondescript grey and thinning behind a slightly eroded scalp-line. In repose the expression of the face is as glum as that of most adults. In conversation it is animated and friendly, perhaps too friendly. I usually have the over-eager manner of one who fears to be disliked. When talking freely I laugh often and loudly without being aware of it. My voice (I judge from tape-recordings) is naturally quick and light, but grows firm and penetrating when describing a clear idea or recollection: otherwise it stammers and hesitates a lot because I am usually reflecting on the words I use and seeking to improve and correct them. When I notice I am saying something glib, naive, pompous, too erudite, too optimistic, or too insanely grim I try