Of Me and Others. Alasdair Gray

teacher read this aloud to the class, pointing out that I had not only used every item on the list, I had used them in the order of listing. While writing the verses I had been excited by my mastery of the materials. I now felt extraordinarily interesting. Most people become writers by degrees. From me, in an instant, all effort to become anything else dropped like a discarded overcoat. I never abandoned verse but came to spend more time writing prose – small harmless items interested me less than prehistoric monsters, Roman arenas, volcanoes, cruel queens and life on other planets. I aimed to write a novel in which all these would be met and dominated by me, a boy from Glasgow. I wanted to get it written and published when I was twelve, but failed. Each time I wrote some opening sentences I saw they were the work of a child. The only works I managed to finish were short compositions on subjects set by the teacher. She was not the international audience I wanted, but better than nobody.

      At the age of twelve I entered Whitehill Senior Secondary School, a plain late 19th-century building of the same height and red sandstone as adjacent tenements, but more menacing. The playgrounds were walled and fenced like prison exercise yards: the windows, though huge, were disproportionately narrow, with sills deliberately designed to be far above our heads when we sat down. Half of what we studied there impressed me as gloomily as the building. Instead of one teacher I had eight a week, often six a day, and half of them treated me as an obstinate idiot. They had to treat me as an idiot. Compound interests, sines, cosines, Latin declensions, tables of elements tasted to my mind like sawdust in my mouth: those who dished it out expected me to swallow while an almost bodily instinct urged me to vomit. I did neither. My body put on an obedient, hypocritical act while my mind dodged out through imaginary doors. In this I was like many other schoolboys, perhaps most others. Nearly all of us kept magazines of popular adventure serials under our school books and when possible stuck our faces into The Rover, Hotspur, Wizard and highly coloured American comics, then new to Britain, in which the proportion of print to pictorial matter was astonishingly small. Only the extent of my addiction to fictional worlds was worse than normal, being magnified into mania by inability to enjoy much else. I was too clumsily fearful to enjoy football and mix with girls, though women and brave actions were what I most wanted. Since poems, plays and novels often deal with these I easily swallowed the fictions urged on us by the teachers of English, though the authors (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Walter Scott) were far less easily digested than The Rover etc.

      Mr Meikle was my English teacher and managed the school magazine. I met him when I was thirteen. He became my first editor and publisher, and a year or two later, by putting me in charge of the magazine’s literary and artistic pages, enabled me to edit and publish myself. There must have been times when he gave me advice and directions, but these were offered so tactfully that I cannot remember them: I was only aware of freedom and opportunity. Quiet courtesy, sympathy and knowledge are chiefly what I recall of him, and a theatricality so mild that few of us saw it as such, though it probably eased his dealings with those inclined to mistake his politeness for weakness. I will try to describe him more exactly.

      His lined triangular face above a tall thin body, his black academic gown, thin dark moustache, dark eyebrows and smooth reddish hair gave him a pleasantly saturnine look, especially as the cheerfully brushed-back hair emphasized two horn-shaped bald patches, one on each side of his brow. While the class worked quietly at a writing exercise he would sit marking homework at his tall narrow desk, and sometimes one of his eyebrows would shoot up into a ferociously steep question mark, and then sink to a level line again while the other eyebrow shot up. This suggested he had read something terrible in the page before him, but was now trying to understand the writer’s frame of mind. Such small performances always caused a faint stir of amusement among the few who saw them, a stir he gave no sign of noticing. Sometimes, wishing to make my own eyebrows act independently, I held one down with a hand and violently worked the other, but I never managed it. Outside the classroom Mr Meikle smoked a meerschaum pipe. He conducted one of the school choirs which competed in the Glasgow music festivals. His slight theatrical touches had nothing to do with egotism. As he paced up and down the corridors between our desks and talked about literature he was far more interested in the language of Shakespeare, and what Milton learned from it, and what Dryden learned from Milton, and what Pope learned from Dryden, than in himself.

      Not everyone liked Mr Meikle’s teaching. He did not stimulate debates about what Shakespeare or Pope said, he simply replied to any question we raised about these, explained alternative readings, said why he preferred one of them and went on talking. Nor did he dictate to us glib little phrases which, repeated in an essay, would show an examiner that the student had been driven over the usual hurdles. He let us scribble down what we liked in our English note-books. This style of teaching seemed to some as dull as I found the table of elements, but it just suited me. While he told us, with erudition and humour, the official story of English literature, I filled note-book after note-book with doodles recalling the fictions I had discovered at the local cinema, on my parents bookshelves, in the local library. I was not ignoring Mr Meikle. While sketching doors and corridors into the worlds of Walt Disney, Tarzan, Hans Andersen, Edgar Allan Poe, Lewis Carroll and H. G. Wells I was pleased to hear how the writers of Hamlet, Paradise Lost, The Rape of the Lock and Little Dorrit had invented worlds which were just as spooky. I was still planning a book containing all I valued in other works, but one of these works was beginning to be Glasgow. I had begun to think my family, neighbours, friends, the girls I could not get hold of were as interesting as any people in fiction – almost as interesting as me, but how could I show it? Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man suggested a way, but I doubted if I could write such a book before I was seventeen. Meanwhile Mr Meikle’s voice absorbed my whole attention. I remember especially his demonstrations of the rhetorical shifts by which Mark Anthony in Julius Caesar changes the mind of the mob.

      My private talks with Mr Meikle took place before the class but out of its earshot. We could talk quietly because my head, as I stood beside his desk, was level with his as he sat leaning on it. I remember telling him something about my writing ambitions and adding that, while I found helpful suggestions in his teaching and in the music, history and art classes, the rest of my schooling was a painful hindrance, a humiliating waste of time for both me and my teachers. Mr Meikle answered that Scottish education was not designed to produce specialists under the age of eighteen. Students of science and engineering needed a grounding in English before a Scottish university accepted them, arts students needed a basis of maths, both had to know Latin and he thought this wise. Latin was the language of people who had made European culture by combining the religious books of the Jews with the sciences and arts of the skeptical Greeks. Great writers in every European language had been inspired by Roman literature; Shakespeare only knew a little Latin, but his plays showed he put the little he knew to very good use. Again, mathematics were also a language, an exact way of describing mental and physical events which created our science and industry. No writer who wished to understand the modern world should ignore it. I answered that Latin and maths were not taught like languages through which we could discover and say great things, they were taught as ways to pass examinations – that was how parents and pupils and most of the teachers viewed them; whenever I complained about the boring nature of a Latin or mathematical exercise nobody explained there could be pleasure in it, they said, “You can forget all that when you’ve been through university and got a steady job.” Mr Meikle looked thoughtfully across the bent heads of the class before him, and after a pause said he hoped I would be happy in what I wished to do with my life, but most people, when their educations stopped, earned their bread by work which gave them very little personal satisfaction, but must be done properly simply because their employers required it and our society depended upon it. School had to prepare the majority for their future, as well as the lucky few. He spoke with a resignation and regret I only fully understood eight or nine years later when I earned my own bread, for a while, by school-teaching.

      This discussion impressed and disturbed me. Education – schooling – was admired by my parents and praised by the vocal part of Scottish culture as a way to get liberty, independence and a more useful and satisfying life. Since this was my own view also, I had thought the parts of my schooling which felt like slavery were accidents which better organization would abolish. That the parts which felt like slavery were a deliberate preparation for more serfdom – that our schooling was simultaneously