Mavis Belfrage (16 page)

Yet in his last fifteen years I hardly saw him at all, maybe because I no longer supported a family so had less need to borrow. After his retirement he became a recluse and solitary drinker, his only human contacts being a cleaning lady and a weekly phone call from Greta Hodgins in Ireland. I felt sad and guilty when he died. He had given me much more than I ever gave him.

I will now list other ingredients which went into “Edison's
Tractatus”
.

1
In the 1960s I heard that Wittgenstein's
Tractatus
was a very brainy book. I thought it might not be too brainy for me but never got hold of a copy.

2
I am too shy and pessimistic to start conversations with strangers but when public transport or an eating
house places me beside an attractive one I sometimes fantasize about talking to them. This habit led to my first television play and a novel which is still in print. In 1982 I worked with Liz Lochhead, Jim Kelman and Tom Leonard on a review called
The Pie of Damocles
. I scribbled a sketch in which a young woman at a café table asks a depressed young man to pass her the sugar bowl and he insists on discussing what this might lead to before refusing. My friends did not think it funny. I discarded it.

3
I started hearing the word
interface
in the 1970s. It seemed to be used by people erecting a barrier round their work practice while talking across it. The barrier made the job they had mastered feel safer but conversation across it sometimes made new work, as forensic medicine had developed from the interface between policing and doctoring. My facetious attitude to new words led me to link activities between which no interface was possible – the gap between Aztec pottery and Chinese obstetrics, for instance, seemed unbridgeable. Around the same time I heard a lecturer amuse a university audience by referring to something as “an example of interdisciplinary cross-sterilization”.

4
For several years I have been perplexed by the adjective
post-modern
, especially when applied to my own writing, but have now decided it is an academic substitute for
contemporary
or
fashionable
. Its prefix honestly announces it as a specimen of intellectual
afterbirth, a fact I only noticed when I reread my brainy character saying so.

5
A few years ago I heard that a scientist had shown how a butterfly stamping on a leaf in a tropical rain forest might precipitate a hurricane in North America. This may or may not be true.

6
In the first months of 1994 I conducted a creative writing class at St Andrews University. Going home by train to Glasgow one day I sat opposite a young woman who was writing in red ink on a block of graph paper. I could not read her words but they were shaped with unusual clearness and regularity. She was slightly bigger than average, neatly dressed and with no apparent make-up or anything to catch the eye. I felt a strong prejudice in her favour, believing, perhaps wrongly, that she was unusually intelligent. I suddenly wanted to put her in a story exactly as she appeared. She sometimes exchanged words with a young man beside her but their conversation did not interest me.

I broke my journey home at Markinch to visit Malcolm Hood in Glenrothes Hospital. Two years earlier he had been paralysed by a cerebral stroke: his brain was in full working order but his body could give no sign of it. He was now able to speak and move a little. On this visit I read him a story from Somerville and Ross's
Experiences of an Irish R.M
. and occasional comments and snorts of laughter showed his enjoyment. When students at Glasgow Art School forty years before we had often read aloud to each other
from amusing authors. My favourites were Max Beerbohm and Rabelais, Malcolm's were Dickens and Patrick Campbell. Campbell – an Anglo-Irish humorist not much read now – probably gave us our first taste of Blarney, which I define as
the employment of an Irish idiom to make an unlikely story more convincing
. The Somerville and Ross tale was full of it.

When I boarded a homeward-bound train at Markinch “Edison's
Tractatus”
was germinating. I scribbled most of it in a notebook before reaching Glasgow, and as I did so imagined an Irish voice saying it, an Irish voice deliberately constructing an improbable tale. That is why I gave it an improbable title. Were I to read it aloud I would do so in my Scottish voice, but when writing “Edison's
Tractatus”
the sentences moved to a second-hand Irish lilt.

7
This lilt must come from more than a fortnight in Tipperary thirty-five years ago and from renewed pleasure in the Blarney of Somerville and Ross. Flann O'Brien's writings are an ingredient because, though Joyce, Synge and O'Casey use Blarney on occasions, O'Brien is the only Irish genius whose work is Blarney throughout. In the previous six months I had also read with pleasure “This Fella I Knew”, a short story by my friend Bernard MacLaverty who never talks Blarney and hardly ever writes it. This one story is an exception. It appears in his anthology,
Walking the Dog
, published in 1994.

8
A week after scribbling the first version of “Edison's
Tractatus”
a student in my St Andrews class asked how
I got ideas for stories. I gave a long confused answer because each novel, short story or play seemed to form differently. What set it going might be a story I had read which I wanted to tell differently, or a daydream, or dream remembered on waking, or a fantasy I had evolved during conversation, or an incident which had befallen someone else but was unforgettable because of its oddity, humour or injustice. Ideas have sometimes come from commissions to write on a particular subject. Thereafter the idea grew through an alternation of writing and deliberate day-dreaming. If a narrative drew in many memories, ideas and phrases which had lain unused in my brain it sometimes expanded to a novella, novel or play. All but my first novel came that way. The first came from childhood faith in a long printed story as my surest way of getting attention. I day-dreamed and scribbled it for years before accumulating enough ideas and experiences to finish it. I have also developed stories by telling or reading parts to friends before completion. Most authors I know avoid this because displaying unfinished work reduces their enthusiasm for it, but some listeners' suggestions have expanded my tales in ways I might not have discovered by myself.

The student's question produced this account of what went into “Edison's
Tractatus”
. There is probably more than I am conscious of, but I believe the brainy hero is mainly a caricature of traits which Andrew Sykes and I had in common. We were both inclined to turn sexual urges into clever, sometimes boring monologues.

The urge to deliver an uninterrupted monologue is the energy driving most teachers, story-tellers and politicians. “Edison's
Tractatus
” is obviously a portrait

of someone too wordy for his own good,
which also explains the addition
of this bit of intellectual
afterbirth.

Most books nowadays are made of big paper sheets printed, folded and cut into units of thirty-two pages, units which bookbinders call
signatures
. This book contains five signatures – exactly 160 pages. Since the first five stories do not quite fill them I will write another, a true one because just now my imagination can invent nothing short enough. Like other stories in this book it deals with education. I heard it from Angela Mullane, once a colleague of the teacher who is the story's most active yet least interesting character.

A school in the east of Glasgow taught children who could barely read, or found it hard to sit still and concentrate, or had other traits which unsuited them for normal schooling without qualifying them for medical care. In times of full employment (and this was in a time of full employment) such children can be prepared for ordinary jobs by teaching them to read, count and talk with greater confidence, but they
cannot be taught really well in classes of more than ten. The average class size was twenty-five so the teachers often had to teach badly. Before 1986 this meant threatening and sometimes inflicting physical pain. Deliberately inflicted pain was in those days used by teachers in schools for normally healthy and even wealthy children – why should the damaged children of poor folk suffer less?

The pupils mostly came from a council housing scheme built for the very poor in the early 1930s. People there felt that the police were more of a threat than a protection, so small weak people believed that a strong male member of their own family was their likeliest defender. In many Scottish schools the most effective-sounding threat a pupil could hurl at a punitive teacher was, “I'll get my dad to you!” This threat was almost a ritual. Teachers had a stock of equally ritualized replies to it. But many children in the school I speak of had no father or uncle or big brother in their family, and knew that their teachers knew it. A few had mothers with dogs, perhaps for protection. These were able to say, “I'll get my dug to you.”

One day at this school a small boy faced a teacher wielding a leather belt designed for striking people. The boy was either trying to stop himself being beaten or had been beaten already and wished to show he was not completely crushed. Either in fear of pain or in a painful effort to keep some dignity he cried out, “I'll get my –” and hesitated, then cried, “I'll get my
Alstation
to you!” He lived with a granny who could not afford to keep a big dog. The way he pronounced Alsatian proved that his dog was nothing but a badly learned word – a word without power – a word which got him laughed at.

This happened in 1971 or 72 when public education and health were better funded, when British manual workers were better paid, when the middle classes were almost as prosperous but less in debt than today, when the richest classes were (by their own obviously high standards) much poorer.

Other tales in this book have sour endings
but none as bad as this because
the others are fiction.

Glasgow, 20th December 1995