Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

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 the Black Girl in Search of God.

      The last was perhaps the first adult narrative brought to my attention at the age of three or four. I cannot remember that though was told of it later. I recall discovering it in my middle teens among my dad’s books and enjoying it greatly. He then told me he had read it to me when I was wee. The story is an evolutionary fable about human faith, told through the quest of a black girl through the African bush. Converted to Christianity by an English missionary she sets out to find God, but doubting he can be found on earth, and encounters in various dealings 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 a universal maker like my father: vaster, of course, but with an equal vital sense of my importance. I’m 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 prehistory I have forgotten or suppressed, though I returned to it later. It was a beautifully made book with crisp clear black-woodcuts decorating covers, titlepage and text. These were by a young artist called Farrel, obviously influenced by Eric Gill, and like the text it blended the mundane and exotic. A few days ago I learned how closely Shaw worked with Farrel, suggesting some illustrations with preliminary sketches of his own, as Lewis Caroll had worked with Tenniel on the Alice books.

      This was all on the middle shelf of the bedroom bookcase. The shelf above was blocked by 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 at all. The bottom shelf was exactly filled by the Harmsworth Encyclopedia, because the bookcase had been sold along with the Encyclopedia 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 Arctic with Amundsen, and an Armadillo and Aardvarks 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. Saying them gave me a sense of power confirmed by 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 holding blues, reds, yellows, greens, blacks and whites combining in patterns more vivid and easily seen than any where else, apart from our Christmas decorations.

      I found a similar but more complex pleasure in Wills cigarette picture cards, gathered for me by my father into slim little squareish pale grey albums costing a penny, when empty. There was an album for Garden Flowers, Garden Hints, British Wild Animals, Railway Equipment, Cycling and Aircraft of the Royal Airforce. These cards, five to each page, were windows into places where weather was always a bright afternoon and everything was in best condition. Cigarette card albums, encyclopedias and The Miracle of Life are still a source of information and imagery for me, though I have since added others. Together with The Black Girl in Search of God they occupied the place an illustrated family bible may have held in the lives of my father’s parents, who died before I was born.

      From my four and a half years before the Second World War began – or from the five years before it hotted up – I also remember a big book of Hans Andersen fairy tales, well illustrated, which must have been read to me because I cannot remember not knowing The Marsh Kings Daughter and The Brave Tin Soldier and The Tinderbox and The Little Match Girl and The Snow Queen and The Little Mermaid and their mingling of magic with the ordinary urban and domestic, and their terrible sad sense of how quickly things change and are lost to faithful people whose affections do not. There were flower-fairy books, Rupert Bear annuals (also in sunny colours) Milnes’ House at Pooh Corner and two Christoper Robin verse books. All these books were left behind when we flitted from our home until the war ended, spending the last three or four years of it in Wetherby, a Yorkshire market town.

      And there I read with delight Lofting’s Dr Doolittle books, Kipling’s Just So Stories, Thackeray’s The Rose and The Ring (all illustrated by their authors), the Alice books, and Kingsley’s Waterbabies in (as I was careful to mention in the 1951 school reading report) the unabridged version. Also The Wind in the Willows, though a chapter called The Piper at the Gates of Dawn embarrassed and annoyed me. I dislike mysteriously superior presences. With the exception of Wind in the Willows and Thackeray’s book all these had (like Shaw’s Black Girl fable) encyclopedic scope, mingling people, animals and magic, going under the earth and soaring over it, making as free with time and space as any Indian or African creation myth, or Paradise Lost, or Goethe’s Faust, or Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. And all these books were strengthened by artfully blending the impossible and normal. That the fairy-tale tyrant of Crim Tartary should be a very commonplace Victorian pater familias at home – that, even so, when unexpectedly enchanted by a lovely chambermaid he instinctively proposed in Shakespearian rhyming couplets to marry her after drowning his first wife – seemed to me wonderfully comic. It was incredible but appropriate.

      Which brings my reading to the age of ten without even mentioning Kingsley’s Heroes, Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales, a version of the Odyssey for children and Gods, Graves and Scholars, a book about the archeological discovery of Troy, Mycenae, Minoa, Babylon, Nineveh, Egypt and Yucatan.

      Childhood Writing and Mr Meikle

      This story is not fiction, for the dream occurred to me, though I admit adding to the end more poets than I recalled upon waking. I also imagined the last reparteé with Archie Hind. It came last in my book Ten Tales Tall and True in 1993, published by Bloomsbury, one of 13 tales. The title page said, “This book contains more tales than 10, so the title is a tall tale too. I would spoil the book if I shortened that, spoil the title if I made it true.” Mr Meikle did not live to see the book but I read him the story before he died and drew his portrait, to place as a vignette on the last page. He was pleased about that. I am glad it has the same place here. This was my first book to be type-set by a friend living in Glasgow, Donald Saunders.

      AT THE AGE OF FIVE I SAT in a room made and furnished by folk I never met and had never heard of me. Here, in a crowd of nearly forty strangers, I remained six hours a day and five days a week for many years, being ordered about by a much bigger, older stranger who found me no more interesting than the rest. Luckily the prison was well stocked with pencils and our warder (a woman) wanted us to use them. One day she asked us what we thought were good things to write poems about. The four or five with opinions on the matter (I was one of them) called out suggestions which she wrote down on the blackboard:-

       A FAIRYA MUSHROOMSOME GRASSPINE NEEDLESA TINY STONE

      We thought these things poetic because the verses in our school-books mostly dealt with small, innocuous items. The teacher now asked everyone in the class to write their own verses about one or more of these items. With ease, speed, hardly any intelligent thought I wrote this:-

       A fairy on a mushroom,sewing with some grass,and a pine-tree needle,for the time to pass.Soon the grass it withered,The needle broke away,She sat down on a tiny stone,And wept for half the day.