Lanark: a life in 4 books (84 page)

“Correct sir,” said the figure, bowing respectfully. “We have been sent to bestow on you an extraordinary privilege.”

“Who sent you?” said Lanark peevishly. “Institute or council? I dislike both.”

“Knowledge and government are dissolving. I now represent the ministry of earth.”

“Everything keeps getting renamed. I’ve stopped caring. Don’t try to explain.”

The figure bowed again and said, “You will die tomorrow at seven minutes after noon.”

The words were almost drowned by a squawking gull turning in the sky overhead, but Lanark understood them perfectly. Like a mother’s fall in a narrow lobby, like a policeman’s hand on his shoulder, he had known or expected this all his life. A roaring like a terrified crowd filled his ears; he whispered, “Death is not a privilege.”

“The privilege is knowing when.”

“But I … I seem to remember passing through several deaths.”

“They were rehearsals. After the next death nothing personal will remain of you.”

“Will it hurt?”

“Not much. Just now there is no feeling in your left arm; you can’t move it. In a moment it will get better again, but at five minutes after noon tomorrow your whole body will become like that. For two minutes you will be able to see and think but not move or speak. That will be the worst time. You will be dead when it stops.”

Lanark scowled with self-pity and annoyance. The chamberlain said, respectfully “Have you a complaint?”

“I ought to have more love before I die. I’ve not had enough.”

“That is everyone’s complaint. You can appeal against the death sentence if you have something better to do.”

“If you’re hinting that I should go in for more adventures, no thank you, I don’t want them. But how will my son—how will the
world
manage when I’m not here?”

The chamberlain shrugged and spread his hands.

“Well go away, go away,” said Lanark more kindly. “You can tell the earth I would have preferred a less common end, like being struck by lightning. But I’m prepared to take death as it comes.”

The chamberlain vanished. Lanark forgot him, propped his chin on his hands and sat a long time watching the moving clouds. He was a slightly worried, ordinary old man but glad to see the light in the sky.

I STARTED MAKING MAPS WHEN I WAS SMALL
SHOWING PLACE,
RESOURCES, WHERE THE ENEMY
AND WHERE LOVE LAY. I DID NOT KNOW
TIME ADDS TO LAND. EVENTS DRIFT CONTINUALLY DOWN,
EFFACING LANDMARKS, RAISING THE LEVEL, LIKE SNOW.

I HAVE GROWN UP. MY MAPS ARE OUT OF DATE.
THE LAND LIES OVER ME NOW.
I CANNOT MOVE. IT IS TIME TO GO.

GOODBYE

TAILPIECE: How Lanark Grew

Hullo again. When Canongate published
Lanark
in 1981 I was 45 and thought the book would become famous, when I was dead. A London publisher told me
Lanark
might get a cult following in the USA and would do less well in Britain. But since 1981 it has been steadily reprinted here, and I have often been asked the following questions.

Q
What is your background?

A
If background means surroundings: first 25 years were lived in Riddrie, east Glasgow, a well-maintained district of stone-fronted corporation tenements and semi-detached villas. Our neighbours were a nurse, postman, printer and tobacconist, so I was a bit of a snob. I took it for granted that Britain was mainly owned and ruled by Riddrie people – people like my dad who knew Glasgow’s deputy town clerk (he also lived in Riddrie) and others who seemed important men but not more important than my dad. If background means family: it was hardworking, well-read and very sober. My English grandad was a Northampton foreman shoemaker who came north because the southern employers blacklisted him for trade-union activities. My Scottish grandad was an industrial blacksmith and congregational elder. My dad fought in the First World War, which made an agnostic Socialist of him. He received a stomach wound that got him a small government pension, worked a cardboard-box cutting machine in a factory that survived the 1930s depression of trade, and in 1931 married Amy Fleming, a shop assistant in a Glasgow department store. She was a good housewife and efficient mother who liked music and had sung in the Glasgow Orpheus Choir. Dad hiked and climbed mountains for a hobby, and did voluntary secretarial work for the Camping Club of Great Britain and the Scottish Youth Hostel Association. Mum had fewer ways of enjoying herself after marriage and I now realise wanted more from life, though she seldom grumbled. So they were a typical couple. I had a younger sister I bullied and fought with until we started living in separate houses. Then she became one of my best friends.

Q
What was childhood like?

A
Apart from the attacks of asthma and eczema, mostly painless but frequently boring. My parents ‘main wish for me was that I go to university. They wanted me to get a professional job, you see, because professional people are not so likely to lose their income during a depression. To enter university I had to pass exams in Latin and mathematics which I hated. So half my school experience was passed in activities which felt to my brain like a meal of sawdust to the mouth. And of course there was homework. My father wanted to relieve the drudgery of learning by taking me cycling and climbing, but I hated enjoying myself in his shadow, and preferred the escapist worlds of comics and films and books: books most of all. Riddrie had a good library. I had a natural preference for all sorts of escapist crap, but when I had read all there was of that there was nothing left but good stuff: and myth and legend, and travel, biography and history. I regarded a well-stocked public library as the pinnacle of democratic socialism. That a good dull place like Riddrie had one was proof that the world was essentially well organized. I realize I am talking here about my life from 11 years onward, after the Second World War. During it, with evacuation in 1939 to a farm in Auchterarder (an experience I used in
The Oracle’s Prologue
) in the mining town of Stonehouse, Lanarkshire (which I used in
1982 Janine
, my second novel) and Wetherby in Yorkshire, life was not under the almost total jurisdiction of the Scottish Education system with my parents’ full support, so not at all dull.

Q
When did you realize you were an artist?

A
I did not realize it. Like all infants who were allowed materials to draw with, I did, and nobody suggested I stop. At school I was even encouraged to do it. And my parents (like many parents in those days) expected their children to have a party piece – a song or poem they would perform at domestic gatherings. The poems I recited were very poor A A Milne stuff. I found it possible to write verses which struck me as equally good, if not better, because they were mine. My father typed them for me, and the puerile little stories which I sent to children’s magazines and children’s radio competitions. When I was eleven I read a four-minute programme of my own compositions on Scottish BBC children’s hour. But I was eight or nine years old when it occurred to me that I would one day write a story which would get printed in a book. This gave me a feeling of deliriously joyful power.

Q
What sort of things did you draw when you were a child?

A
Space ships, monsters, maps of imaginary planets and kingdoms, the settings for stories of romantic and violent adventure, which I told my sister when we walked to school together. She was the first audience I could really depend on in the crucial years between seven and eleven. If you have read
Lanark
you will notice how much of Book 1 – the first half of the Thaw section – draws upon my childhood. It does not show how much help and sympathy my mum, dad and sister gave me. I took it for granted as something natural and ordinary because so did they. When I came to use the material of my childhood in that novel what I remembered were our quarrels – they were more dramatic than the support I took for granted.

Q
When and why did you want to make a story of your life?

A
Surely everyone wants to be a hero or heroine? I’m sure all children do, probably when they stop being babies and find they have very little power over the world, apart from the power they imagine having. Books contained worlds I could grasp and manage through day-dreaming. The complete plays of Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen stood on the middle shelf of a bookcase in my parents’ bedroom beside Carlyle’s
French Revolution
, Macaulay’s essays,
The History of the Working Classes in Scotland
and
Our Noble Families
by Tom Johnson, a Thinkers Library volume called Humanity’s
Gain from Unbelief
, an anthology of extracts for atheists called
Lift up Your Heads
, a large blue-grey bound volume with
The Miracle of Life
stamped in gold on the spine. This contained essays on the Dawn of Life, What Evolution Means, Life that has Vanished, Evolutions as the Clock Ticks, The Animal Kingdom, The Plant Kingdom, Man’s Family Tree, Races of Mankind, The Human Machine at Work, Psychology through the Ages, Discoverers of Life’s Secrets. The 476 pages (excluding the index) were half given to black-and-white photographs and diagrams. The middle shelf also held Shaw’s
Quintessence of Ibsenism
and
The Adventures of a Black Girl in Search
of God
, and I believe the last was the first adult narrative brought to my attention, though I cannot remember it. I remember first reading it with pleasure and excitement in my middle teens, but years later my father told me he had read it to me when I was wee – perhaps four years old. The story presents an evolutionary view of the human faith through the quest of a black girl through the African bush. Converted to Christianity by an English missionary she sets out to find God, not doubting he can be found on earth, and encounters in various clearings the gods of Moses, Job and Isaiah, then meeting Ecclesiastes the Preacher, Jesus, Mahomet, the founders of the Christian sects, an expedition of scientific rationalists, Voltaire the sceptic and George Bernard Shaw the socialist, who teach her that God should not be searched for but worked for, by cultivating the small piece of world in our power as intelligently and unselfishly as possible.

The moral of this story is as high as human wisdom has reached, but I cannot have grasped it then. My father told me that I kept asking, “Will the next god be the
real
one Daddy?” No doubt I would have liked the black girl to have at last met the universal maker like my father: vaster, of course, but with an equally vital sense of my importance. I am glad he did not teach me to believe in that, for I would have had to unlearn it. But my first encounter with this book was in a pre-history I have forgotten or suppressed, though I returned to it later. It was a beautifully made book with crisp clear black woodcuts decorating covers, with title-page and text in a style reminiscent of Eric Gill. Like the text it convincingly blended the mundane and exotic.

This was all on the middle shelf of our Riddrie bedroom bookcase. The shelf above was blocked by the orange-red spines of Left Wing Book Club, four-fifths of it being the collected works of Lenin in English: dense text with no pictures or conversations in it at all. The bottom shelf was exactly filled by the Harmsworth Encyclopaedia, because the bookcase had been sold along with the Encyclopaedia by the publisher, who owned the
Daily Record
in which they were first advertised. This contained many pictures, mostly grey monochrome photographs, but each alphabetical section had a complex line drawing in front, a crowded landscape in which an enthroned figure representing Ancient History (for example) was surrounded by orders of Architecture, an Astronomical telescope, glimpses of Australia and the Antarctic with Amundsen, and an Armadillo and Aardvark rooting around a discarded Anchor. I gathered that these volumes contained explanations of everything there is and had been, with lives of everyone important. The six syllables of the name EN-CY-CLO-PAED-I-A seemed to sum up these thick brown books which summed up the universe, so saying it gave me a sense of power confirmed by the pleasure this gave my parents. But the four colour plates showing flags of all nations and heraldic coats-of-arms gave an undiluted pleasure which was purely sensuous. I was fascinated by the crisp oblongs and lozenges holding blues, reds, yellows, greens, blacks and whites combining in patterns more vivid and easily seen than anywhere else, apart from our Christmas decorations.

Healthy children exercise their imaginations by playing games together. I was not healthy. My imagination was mainly exercised in solitary fantasies fed by films and pictures and books. From these I sometimes got the feeling that life could be glorious, a feeling often inspired by sexual episodes in books and not always the best episodes. I felt it in
1984
when Winston saves the girl he detests from stumbling in a corridor in the ministry of Truth, and finds after she has given him a note saying, “I love you”; also when David Copperfield gets the courage to propose to Agnes, who then tells him she has always loved him. Also in
Peer
Gynt
, when his mother Aase and fiancée Solveig save him from The Great Boig by ringing the church bells and that vast foggy enclosing force dissolves saying, “He is too strong for us – he has women behind him.” I also felt it in the climax of
The Portrait of
the Artist as a Young Man
when Stephen Dedalus sees the young bare-legged girl paddling on the beach, and she accepts the worship of his glance, and with a heartfelt “Holy God!” he turns and walks toward the sunset knowing he will be an artist, which is the greatest sort of priest. Also in Joyce Cary’s
The Horse’s
Mouth
when Gulley Jimson, fatally injured in the destruction of his mural painting, is carried off laughing in the ambulance because he knows he was doing his best work right up to the end. And Joyce Cary’s novel brought me to the books of William Blake because Gulley Jimson kept quoting him. The Glasgow Mitchell Library had facsimiles and originals – and Blake’s work in verse and picture and prose struck me then and strikes me now as true, beautiful and good. The airy freedom of his naked figures felt like liberation. So did the elaborately clothed, slightly perverse figures of Aubrey Beardsley. And in case this all sounds too high-minded I was terribly stimulated by the highly coloured American comics which first came to Britain in the late 1940s when I was in my early teens. They showed Wonderwoman, Sheena the Jungle Girl and other females with figures and faces like glamorous film-stars of that time, but wearing much less clothing, and since the representation of normal sexual practice was forbidden by the USA moral code their adventures involved them in capture and bondage instead. Such fantasies compensated for my own sexual timidity.