Alasdair Gray
OLD MEN IN LOVE
312pp. Bloomsbury. £20.
978 0 7475 9353 9
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can
never forget what they did here”, said Abraham Lincoln. Not since
Shakespeare promised to immortalize the “fair youth” over whose identity
scholars still squabble had anyone made such a hash of second-guessing
posterity. The Gettysburg Address has gone down in history; but to what
extent do we really recall those fallen heroes? Even as he spoke, the great
statesman disenfranchised the dead, co-opting their “sacrifice” as so many
votes for democracy (no matter that many had been fighting on the other
side). An undifferentiated mass by now, they had died, Lincoln told his
listeners, “that government of the people, by the people, for the people,
shall not perish from the earth”.
One score and six years ago now, Alasdair Gray made Scottish literary history
with the publication of Lanark, his “Glasgow Ulysses”. Among a great many
other things, that extraordinary novel describes the struggles of a boy from
a lower-middle-class family who wishes to pursue an artistic vocation. “So
what do you want to do?”, his father asks Duncan when the moment comes for
him to leave school. “That’s irrelevant, isn’t it?”, the boy replies. To
aspire to self-expression is not just over-optimistic but quasi-criminal; to
desire to be different is implicitly to criticize everybody else. “You scare
me sometimes, Duncan”, says a classmate: “The things you say arenae
altogether sane. It all comes of wanting to be superior to ordinary life”.
For Gray’s democratic intellect, any system that fails to take account of
the individual yearnings of the many, cannot truly be considered
representative at all.
Virginia Woolf, notoriously, put down the original Ulysses as the product of a
“self-taught working man”. It was not just the squalid subject matter that
she found “nauseating”; she was as profoundly alienated by the “egotistic,
insistent” quality of James Joyce’s novel. Snobbery aside (and there was
clearly a fair bit of that), it evidently troubled someone brought up to see
self-expression as an entitlement to find a writer so obviously exhilarated
at the opportunity of giving his creativity free rein.
Far from seeing it as a source of shame, a man of Gray’s generation, and one
with his West of Scotland background, sees auto-didacticism as a badge of
honour. Even so, there is a joie de vivre about his work that betrays a
comparable delight in the fact of being published, in the thought of
appearing in print and being read.
Other writers may produce texts, but Gray’s books will always very definitely
be books – all tooled covers, engraved illustrations, ornamental
chapter-heads, typographical devices. And then there are the authorial
esprits, the inclusion of made-up commentators and real-life friends – as
well as guest appearances by Gray himself. There are also endless allusions:
Sidney Workman, the fractious fictional scholar whose comments are included
in the “Epilogue” of Lanark, identifies no fewer than three distinct
categories of what he uncharitably calls “plagiarisms”. There is a danger in
theorizing all this playfulness away as “postmodernism”, but that is still
preferable to dismissing it as whimsy or self-indulgence. Setting themselves
against the ideal of seamless self-containment that conventional narratives
have always sought, Gray’s texts are always emphatically open – to question,
to commentary. They are democratically accountable, in other words. Bustling
as they are with intertextual references and with the entrances and exits of
characters, fictional and real, they feel more like a public than a private
space. If the novel was traditionally to be enjoyed at home, to be curled up
with in a quiet corner, reading Gray can seem more like visiting a busy
municipal library.
The life of John Tunnock, in Gray’s new novel, Old Men in Love, is lived
largely in the public sphere, despite the fact that he himself is
comparatively obscure – a retired schoolteacher and a serious but largely
unrecognized writer. The “posthumous papers” that make up the book are
introduced by one Lady Sara Sim-Jaegar, an aristocratic Englishwoman
domiciled in California, but now, as Tunnock’s distant relative, his heir.
“Mr Alasdair Gray” has persuaded her to allow him to edit this material for
publication. The contents range from a brief obituary in the Glasgow Herald
through a memoir of growing up in Hillhead in the 1940s (Tunnock’s Place and
Time) to the everyday jottings he recorded in his diary. Essentially a
stranger, Lady Sara is disposed to view the house she has inherited from
Tunnock as a piece of real estate. Once she is inside, though, it makes her
think of a “museum”. With its Burne-Jones stained-glass windows made by
Morris and Company (Gray’s own values show an obvious kinship with those of
the Arts and Crafts Movement), a “palatial” Victorian lavatory, antique bath
and light fittings, a 1930s television set and a pianola with some 300
rolls, Tunnock’s home is a monument to the creativity and skills of
long-forgotten workers. Also significant is the fact that we experience it
as a public place.
That, his diary reveals, is pretty much the way it was treated in Tunnock’s
lifetime. He seems to have been a visitor in his own house. Virginia Woolf
would have been hard put to recoil more fastidiously than Lady Sara on
reading the recollections of this particular Old Man in Love – though it is
his hopeless inertia that horrifies her more than any pornographic detail.
Named, unromantically, for a brand of teacake, Tunnock had no sex life
before 1998, his solicitor admits, though he had apparently “lashed out a
bit” thereafter. As recorded in his diary, this scandalous old age seems to
have consisted mainly in the passive acceptance of the comings and goings of
a series of younger women. They availed themselves of his house, his drink,
his money and his more valuable pieces of bric-a-brac, sometimes (though by
no means always) offering sexual comfort in return. His home was certainly
no sanctuary – indeed he was finally found dead there, in mysterious
circumstances, after a gathering of a lover’s criminal friends. That some
might see such an existence as sad does not appear to have occurred to
Tunnock, who seems – most of the time, at least – to have been more or less
contented.
His diaries reveal a man with relatively little use for a private life –
except as a place in which to produce the writings by which he hopes to make
his public intervention. For the rest, he is happier in his perambulations
about Glasgow’s West End, meeting friends and acquaintances in his local
bars and cafés. In between, an old man out of love with just about every
aspect of New Labour’s Britain, he gives us his views on everything from
Private Finance Initiatives to celebrity magazines. He keeps an ill-tempered
eye on the affairs of the world, from the aftermath of the attacks of
September 11, 2001 until his death in April 2007. Of the works in progress
presented in Old Men in Love, one aims to provide a “panoptic vision” of
Scotland which he hopes will be the “bible” of a “new and independent”
country. In the spirit of Gray’s Book of Prefaces (2000), this new novel
offers us “the Prologue”: from the Big Bang to Blair and Brown in seven
pages.
The great novel (or, rather, “historical trilogy”) on which Tunnock was
toiling when he died is just as far-reaching in its scope, and as ambitious
in its intention. It too has a prologue which describes how Tunnock was
inspired by the life of the nineteenth-century Barrhead poet John Davidson,
and in particular a lyric of his he found in an anthology:
This Beauty, this Divinity, this Thought,
This hallowed bower and harvest of delight
Whose roots ethereal seemed to clutch the stars,
Whose amaranths perfumed eternity,
Is fixed in earthly soil enriched with bones
Of used-up workers; fattened with the blood
Of prostitutes, the prime manure . . . .
What might be called a labour theory of artistic value underpins Tunnock’s
developing fiction, to be entitled WHO PAID FOR ALL THIS? Set in the
original democracy, Classical Athens, its first volume, The Gadfly, centres
on the dissenting character of Socrates. Its opening chapter, “Citizens”,
shows the men of Athens, not in the Agora but as soldiers on campaign. This
was a civilization, we are reminded, whose achievements included not only
the Parthenon but the carnage of the Peloponnesian War. The second chapter
is called “State Funeral”; Lincoln-like, Pericles makes a powerful oration
over the dead, the brave defenders of the freedoms of Athens. Phidias’ most
significant work in Tunnock’s polis is not the vainglorious statue of
Athene, visible from out at sea, but a mausoleum in which the war dead will
be lain, grouped together according to electoral district.
By 2002, his Classical story set aside, Tunnock has turned his attentions to
Renaissance Florence. He finds his way into the city state’s history via the
life of the monk and painter Filippo Lippi, as filtered through the accounts
of Giorgio Vasari and Robert Browning. Brother Filippo is to be the story of
an artist drawn instinctively and irresistibly to the tangible, rather than
the ideal his monkish superiors wish him to portray. His mistress, the young
novice-nun Lucrezia, was his template for the Virgin, he tells an indulgent
Pope, long before he had even met her. “On seeing her in the parlour of that
little convent I recognized her at once.” A Platonic idea, the Pope observes
– though it is a parodic Platonism rooted firmly in the fleshly and the
real.
Waywardness is central to this novel’s artistic vision; waywardness, rather
than rebellion in the Romantic style. Filippo Lippi makes no show of a non
serviam (he is horrified when the Pope offers to free him from his vows so
he can marry Lucrezia, for that risks losing the salvation members of the
Carmelite order are traditionally guaranteed). If he resists the strictures
of the hierarchy, it is because he cannot help himself. Tunnock has
something of the same problem: when the real-life historian Angus Calder
writes congratulating him on the early Athenian chapters he has read in the
Scottish literary magazine Chapman, he urges Tunnock to think again about
his plan to approach the modern age through the story of a strange Anglican
sect. Instead, Calder suggests, he might move his focus back in time a
little, and further north, to the Edinburgh of the Scottish Enlightenment.
It is by no means a bad idea. Even today (and despite the best efforts of
Irvine Welsh), Edinburgh is often described as a city of doctors and
lawyers, as though no one ever drove a bus or dug a drain. And, fashionable
as it has become to see the “Athens of the North” as the fons et origo of
all that is modern, we are no nearer seeing it steadily or whole. Instead, a
beautiful idea, it floats free, without visible means of support, the lives
of the people who built it and made it work not just lost but disregarded.
But, regardless of the novel he perhaps should be writing, Tunnock persists in
the novel he has actually embarked on (there is of course no shortage of
big, panoramic fictions from the nineteenth century itself). Belovéd, which
takes its name from the title bestowed on Henry James Prince by his devoted
followers, could hardly be further removed from the hurly-burly of Dickens’s
London or Balzac’s Paris. An all-too-historical figure, Prince set himself
up as leader of a small community in the 1830s, ultimately building a
headquarters which he called Agapemone, the “Abode of Love”. This was
basically a country house, built with the money his wealthier followers had
surrendered. Lower-class adherents worked on the estate or as domestic
servants, distinctions of rank preserved even in the earthly paradise.
Prince persuaded his flock that he had so far transcended the realm of the
world, the flesh and the devil as to be the second coming of Christ; he had
to “take flesh” again – by raping his youngest, prettiest virgin follower in
the presence of his dumbfounded congregation. Not surprisingly, this
“Manifestation” shocked the Victorian age; what seems to interest Tunnock
most, however, is the way Prince seeks to run a society as though it were a
home. The encroachment of the private on the public sphere is shown most
strikingly in the community’s church: “It has no altar, lectern, pulpit or
choir stalls . . . . The interior is furnished like an opulent Victorian
drawing room with a large red ottoman sofa in the chancel where the
communion table normally stands”. There is even a billiard table, we are
told.
Socrates is accused at his trial of attempting to sequester his young
students: John Tunnock’s dramatization of this episode is the last sizeable
extract presented in Old Men in Love. “Other teachers talk to the people in
crowds”, says his prosecutor. “You speak to them in small private parties .
. . . You deal with us in ones and twos because we are weaker that way.” The
philosopher counters that nobody in Athens is more sociable than he – “The
streets are my clubrooms. I talk to anyone”. But Anytus is unmoved: “Your
questions split us up . . .”, he says. “You are a criminal because you are a
demoralizer!” While he admits to liking the idea of “this great wise giant
called society”, Socrates wonders where he is going to hear its voice. It is
a good question: Tunnock’s diaries, as the book approaches its end, are
musing on government plans to put away hundreds more offenders in
decommissioned airfields and prison ships, communities of citizens
ostracized by the democratic will. Men and women are casting votes, but only
to oust contestants from that abode of love, the Big Brother house.
Meanwhile, it is apparently at the behest of the British people that
soldiers are killing and dying in Iraq.
Advertising pillars have sprung up in the streets. “This site is managed by
City Centre Posters”, reads the plaque on one, “working in partnership with
Glasgow City Council for a cleaner, more attractive city.” Where individual
liberty is about earning capacity and consumer choice, why wouldn’t civic
consciousness be about commercial opportunities, or beauty about billboards?
Such is the civilization our so-called democracy has brought us. Once again,
in this ingenious, engaging novel, Alasdair Gray has struck a blow for an
altogether more meaningful sort of freedom.
Michael Kerrigan’s The History of Death will be published next month.
His other books include Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the “Beagle”: The
journals that revealed Nature’s grand plan, 2005, and Lewis and Clark:
Blazing a trail through the American West, 2004.
